


Mummers' Show

by pinkolifant



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: AU after DwD, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Book style, F/M, Fantasy, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 03:16:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 54
Words: 338,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1039696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkolifant/pseuds/pinkolifant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bit of a crack fic in which Sansa and Sandor become mummers in a traveling show run by Mance Rayder and end up playing the roles of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. A SanSan story in a broader ASOIAF universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Rider from the North

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Mance Rayder arrives South

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own ASOIAF or any of its characters and I don't make any profit out of writing this.

**Elder Brother**

A rider came in the night from the North.

He proudly carried a worn, light-coloured cloak, adorned with some rare, white and grey fur on its fringes. The hood of the cloak was black, with red thread sewn through the material; clearly visible in the dark fabric.

The monks masked their surprise under the cowls, for few could find their island with the waters risen high, since the white raven came from the Citadel, announcing the end of the long summer. It would take some time before any semblance of winter descended on the riverlands, but it had rained so much in the past weeks that the Quiet Isle became wholly cut off from the rest of Westeros by the flooded streams flowing into the Trident.

The rider came on a strange barge made of wet logs and loose morsels of weapons of which the rivers had been full for years, since the start of the War of the Five Kings. His horse swam; dark brown beast that looked self-assured and not threatened in an unpleasant situation, just like his master. The man was not old, nor very young. He must have seen at least two winters already, but not more. His hair was long and dull brown, with grey hairs plainly visible in the uncouth parts around his ears. He looked as if he could use a good wash and combing. Yet not even the Elder Brother dared suggest it, for his dark eyes harboured an expression much seen in those parts, that of a man who had seen entirely too much of war. And one could never tell what such men were up to.

Under his cloak, he wore a simple black tunic and breeches, bear leather shoes, a pouch with some coin, a writing quill, a longsword and a lute.

"I'm travelling to King's Landing," he told the Elder Brother as soon as he arrived. "I hear they need singers over there, with the times getting difficult and all. The people could use some distraction before the winter comes."

"One man alone could find it arduous to cross unharmed all the way to the capital," the Elder Brother said, the image of calm reigning over his features. "You were fortunate so far, but it only becomes worse when you go farther south. You can stay here for the night if you wish and I would advise you to seek some company for the road."

"I will take your words under consideration," said the rider, taking off his cloak with regal bearing. He led his horse into the custody of the monks lurking behind, who obeyed the unspoken order of the head of their order and took the animal away.

A simple meal was served for all in a large room which could have been a tavern if it didn't belong to the Seven, represented by a candle holder in the shape of the seven-pointed star. There was porridge, and more porridge, dried apples and cheap ale.

The tallest of all monks skulked in the corner, almost immobile, observing the foreigner from a well-practised state of aloofness, eager to ask questions about the North, and to learn whether highborn girls red of hair with blue eyes could be found over there, with or without their dwarf husbands. Speaking was not allowed so he didn't break the vow he never took, loyal as a dog to his new masters.

The rider spoke more freely after the meal.

"I don't suppose any of the brothers has a need to go to King's Landing."

"Some might," said the Elder Brother. "There's this rumour about a trial by combat of the Queen Regent, where a champion of the faith will be required. It should pass in four weeks."

"Any other travellers that I could join?"

"There is a girl with her sick father and a few unruly knights, their leader is called Ser Shadrich, I believe. Or Mad Mouse if you prefer that," the Elder Brother unwillingly volunteered more information.

"A girl? Interesting. Could I speak to them?" asked the guest, touching a few strings on his lute, checking if it was well tuned.

"Before I answer that, why a sudden change of heart? I don't believe it was my words that moved you to continue south with some companions, or the quality of our cooking," the Elder Brother asked politely.

"If it pleases you," said his dinner companion, mockingly, "sometimes a song is not enough. A mummers' show could be much better. See, I've written a lengthy song about a dragon prince and a wolf girl, which begs to be enacted. It could amuse the crowd in King's Landing no end, and bring me some much needed coin."

The Elder Brother was not pleased. "A dragon prince and a wolf girl, you say. What do you know about such noble animals?"

"Me? Nothing. But I know a few things about taking care of people," said the rider, carelessly, striking his lute a few times as if to underline his words.

The tallest monk started collecting the empty plates and tankards. When he passed the newcomer from the North, he stumbled and dropped all the dishes in his lap. After a very clumsy and insincere attempt at cleaning, the imposing brother left in long strides, presumably in the direction of the kitchens.

"What's wrong with him?" asked the northerner, wiping the rests of porridge from his bony knees, curious, observing the stature and the markings of the man who just disrespected him.

"He led a life of violence before he was brought to us by the will of the Seven. A while ago, when he came here, he would have cut you in half for what you just said," the Elder Brother smiled in a benign fashion.

"He could try," the guest challenged his words. "But why would he want to do that?"

"He might have a care or two for wolf girls," replied the Elder Brother not moving any of his facial muscles, observing the stranger's reaction like a bird of prey ready to dive forward.

"These are good tidings for my play. I found a dragon prince then!"

"Good luck with convincing _him_ to take part," said the Elder Brother and stood up to retire for the night. "I will let you talk to the girl's father tomorrow."

"Thank you, brother," the northerner replied in earnest, exhibiting the stern straightforwardness of the people from the far cold end of Westeros for the first time that evening.

The Elder Brother recalled they had a reputation for being stupid in the south, unable to look after themselves in a world which was every bit like a single great bog. Just like in the Neck, the swamp was often deeper than it looked. And there were one too many lizard-lions swarming in its depths.

**Mance**

The morning was chilly and it started raining again. The visitor from the North stood with the Elder Brother in front of a cottage where the girl and her sick father were staying since their arrival. None of the knights who accompanied them stood guard. The monk knocked at the door, which was immediately opened by a slender white hand in long, brown travelling dress, matched with a set of dark brown hair and clear blue eyes, in stark contrast with the overall simplicity of the girl's demeanour.

"My name is Mance and I'm a singer," the visitor said, risking his name. It was a common one and not every Mance was King-beyond-the-Wall. He noticed the girl wincing slightly at the mention of his profession, wondering why anybody would be _afraid_ of singers.

"I'm going to King's Landing," he said, "and I hear that so are you. Perhaps we could travel together and you could be the first listeners to the new songs I mean to sing in the capital."

"I am most pleased to meet you, good ser," the girl answered politely, with only a touch of fear in her voice. "And I would be glad to hear your songs. Be as it may, you should present your proposal to my father."

"Ever a dutiful daughter," commented the Elder Brother from behind, and Mance thought he overheard a note of reproach in his voice, as if the honourable monk did not approve of the girl's course of action.

"May I inquire your name, lady..." Mance tried his best to use the names appropriate for those whose heritage was south of the Wall, with all the lords and ladies kneeling before each other in the right order. _And there are no monsters here, no monsters at all._

"Please, I am no lady," she said, sounding way older than her age, "I am Alayne Stone, natural daughter of Lord Petyr Baelish, Lord Paramount of the Trident. Come in, please. I will present you to my father."

"I will leave you in the honourable company," said the Elder Brother and left rapidly down the hill as if he had been waiting for the first courtesy-wise acceptable moment to do so.

"Brother!" Mance called after the tall monk trotting down towards the main settlement, refusing to look back. "We found ourselves a wolf girl!"

"Pardon me, ser, what did you just say?" the girl inquired, her cheeks flushed with the slightest hue of pink.

"Wolf girl. Does it bother you if I call you that way? Hair colour of ash, just like it should be," said Mance, approvingly.

The girl measured him from tip to toe, fixating his lute, and in particular his dark eyes with the blue of her own. Turning sharply backwards as if to check that no one was listening, she slowly answered his question with one of her own. "On your travels, ser, have you seen a long room in a castle made of stone, where the lord and the lady allowed the smallfolk to sit at their table, separated only by a slightly raised dais? I sometimes dream about it and I wonder if it even exists."

Mance now looked at the girl as if he saw her for the first time for real before he dared speak a small portion of the truth. "Maybe, once, I sang about Bael the Bard in the place that you have seen only in your dreams, in the faraway land where the blood of the earth runs red."

"Thank you for talking to a silly girl," she said, fully in control of her expression once more. "It would gladden my heart if my father would agree with your proposal. Honest company is hard to come by in these troubled times."

Mance Rayder entered the cottage, prepared to encounter that Lord Paramount of the Trident, about whom he knew next to nothing. And already the sound of the title was making him believe that he would have no love for the man. _So be it,_ he thought. The Elder Brother was nonetheless right about one thing. He needed travelling companions. A mummers' play, well written, could go way further in convincing the real listeners he had in mind of the truthfulness of his story than even the best performance he could give on his lute, before his life would be forfeit.

 _If saving my people demands sharing bread and mead with Lords Paramounts of the Trident and their likes_ , he thought, _I'm going to do it gladly._

**The Gravedigger**

The tallest monk was bent under the hill at the edge of the main settlement where graves had to be dug almost every day. He laboured in a company of an old blind dog, forgotten at the Quiet Isle by a wandering septon. The grave he worked on was halfway done when he observed the Elder Brother leading the _northerner_ up the hill to meet whoever had been hiding in the cottage at the far end of the monks' colony already for a week. The Gravedigger was never curious. The three knights that guarded the hidden guests were among the sorriest one he had met in his former life of a killer, so he didn't bother to find out whom they were supposed to be guarding.

But now a _northerner_ went up there, so he was irresistibly drawn to see the unknown guests.

The girl, or better, a young woman who opened the door could not be real. _No._ A ghost of his forcefully sober mind, then. Had he been drinking since he woke up among the monks, he could attribute the vision either to stupor or to wishful thinking. But his tortuous mind was far too clear, clearer than he ever wanted it to be.

He would know her among millions.

The Gravedigger continued digging the grave ferociously, with unmeasured strokes, until every limb in his large body hurt. His fingers itched to hold a greatsword. An impulse ran through his veins, to cut somebody's throat, or to slice a man in two, just like that, for no reason at all. If only he could forget what he saw!

He knew that he could not.

So he put the latest corpse in the hole, and he didn't pray to the Seven as the Elder Brother tried to convince him to do.

He prayed to the Stranger to show him the way.


	2. Perceptions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the characters watch each other

**Mance**

The stench inside the cottage reminded him strongly of a rotting carcass of a mammoth whom the giants didn't bury yet, mourning the lost animal for several days as was their custom. Mance Rayder pushed away the curtains surrounding a simple septry bed and faced a short, skinny man, laying in his own excrement. His right arm was swollen and he must have been suffering from some kind of wound poisoning.

"Father," said the young woman, her voice ever measured, "the Elder Brother recommended this singer to travel south with us. He has come to talk to you and seek your agreement."

Mance knew that her name was not Alayne, as she had told him, and that the wounded man was not her father.

He regretted not asking Jon Snow for the names of all his siblings when he was charged to go south and save his little sister. Then again, they were all supposed to be dead. All except Jon, a special child, and the sister Mance had been sent to look for.

The wildling had seen them all, dressed with motherly love, standing proud to meet the king, when he himself posed as a common singer in Winterfell during King Robert's visit. Several long years had passed since then.

Never had he dreamed that he would meet Jon's _older_ sister on his way. And now that he did, he didn't even know her real name.

The stinky moribund fixated Mance with a malicious regard, and the King-beyond-the-Wall realised that he was expected to speak.

"My lord," he started. _That always appeals to the kneelers_ , he thought, despising the treatment and the people who used it. The expression on the little wounded man's face changed from evil to more neutral, observing, examining, measuring, calculating. _Just like myself up to a certain point_ , Mance thought, amused. _An upstart, always on his guard._

"I am good with the lute and with the sword," Mance continued flatly in a most humble attitude he could muster. "I would offer you my services freely in exchange for a small favour from your side."

"What makes you think we have any need of your services?" the small man retorted; his ability to speak apparently unharmed by the great bodily distress he suffered from.

"For one, your sellswords are few, and your daughter especially beautiful," said the King-beyond-the-Wall matter-of-factly. "More hands have more chance to bring you and her safely to the capital."

"And what do you want in exchange?" asked the overlord of whatever land on the wrong side of the Wall, that Mance couldn't bring himself to care about.

"Nothing much, really. I intend to make some coin in the capital. For that I will present a play, a story, about a forbidden romance in the Targaryen family in distant past. Too distant for anyone to remember it in great detail, I should add. The monks who will travel with me are to assume some roles. I require a lady to read the part of Jonquil in my story, even if she is not called that way... To play the role of the lady love."

"No one touches my daughter," the lord of something, who could relinquish all of his lordships and possessions rather soon to death, stressed every single word through gritted teeth.

"The play is quite innocent, I can assure you. Or the monks would never take part in it," Mance promised, wondering how to make that lie become truth, before Baelish discovered it. "There are no untoward gestures and the main players will wear traditional masks from where I come from," he added as an improvised afterthought.

"And where is that?"

"I come from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, but I have lived in White Harbor since I was a boy," Mance lied some more, hoping that not even the aspiring-to-become Lord Paramount of half of Westeros travelled that far. It would not do to admit that the masks came from the free folk beyond the Wall. He took them for safe keeping when he headed south, should all he loved perish. He never thought to make use of them for anything. His horse brought them intact over the muddy waters in a saddlebag, for which he thanked the old gods, whose existence he doubted, and perhaps some of the new.

"I see," said Baelish and started coughing heavily. Mance was grateful that the attack of his discomposure prevented further conversation. He found that he could take only so much of that man after spending barely a few minutes in his company. The southron lord seemed many times worse than the annoying, late Lord of Bones.

"Consider the proposal, my lord," he said on the exit, much less servile and showing a true measure of himself. "It will only remain open for so long. I have haste to reach King's Landing before the rains ruin all roads."

He let himself out not waiting for the girl. A commotion from under the hill startled him before he could go and look for the Elder Brother. The ugly, orange-haired knight which must have been the good Ser Shadrich was supposedly training a young squire, a child of maybe eleven name days, or more; a weakling, with a wooden sword. The last of the three guards of Baelish and his false daughter; a man grown, but mostly sideways, sat by and watched meekly.

"Turn on your side faster, boy!" Ser Shadrich yelled, "Or you will not live to see the end of your first fight."

The boy's face twitched and he wore an unfocused expression in his eyes. Still he tried hard to attack his opponent. The freckled ser pivoted faster than one would expect from his countenance and the boy landed face down in the mud. The fat seated knight laughed merrily, lifting his feet from the ground in excitement.

The huge monk, who saw fit to shower Mance with porridge the day before, came out of nowhere and picked up the wooden stick the boy dropped. With ease unnatural for someone of the holy profession, he made a few steps forward and hit Ser Shadrich over his chest, his back and his belly in a couple of well measured strokes.

Ser Shadrich jumped away in pain, showing with his hands that he would yield.

The boy raised his head from the ground and commented, "Good! Make him fly!"

The monk tossed away the weapon stick, which looked like a toy in his large arms. Not showing any intention to make anyone fly, he scurried down the hill in the direction of the main monk settlement without another word. Mance could see something else clearly at that point. The man was limping. _Not much, so it would not hurt the show_ , he thought, more decided than before to secure the timely change of service of that brother of the Faith in particular.

Passion was needed for the stage, for singers and mummers alike. Mance had it, and he could sniff out other people who had it in them to catch the eyes and the hearts of the crowd. He used his own inner flame as a leader and a battle commander when necessary. Yet, inside, the true bard was never far away, eager to conquer the audience just for the sake of beauty, with the songs worthy to be remembered.

There was also the looming height and the long hair Mance glimpsed under the cowl. The man should have been a bit thinner and less muscular to perfectly fit his role, but a more commanding presence would  appear far more convincing on the stage than a man resembling too closely the real historical figure who was the main character.

 _They both come from songs, to live only in a play,_ Mance thought with sadness about the long lost lovers of his tale.

 _There is only one little problem with all this_ , he pondered, _how can we talk the good brother into it if they are not allowed to speak in the first place?_

**The Gravedigger**

The Gravedigger felt better after he hit someone. A gnat, no doubt, but still a body to punch. He marvelled at what the Quiet Isle had done to him because despite his foul mood the man was still alive.

It was getting later in the afternoon. No one had died that day yet, so he had to pretend to tidy the old graves near the cottage, trying to ignore the decaying odour coming from it and hoping to see her from afar.

He couldn't tell why he was still compelled to look at her. After all, she could never look at him.

The chain of unhealthy thoughts was halted by the vision of the Maiden come true who opened the door amidst the sickening smell inside. The Gravedigger suppressed the irrational urge to grab her and run.

 _You are not the saviour of fair maidens_ , he reminded himself.  _You are here to dig, so get to it._

She, ever a lady, took a wobbly wooden chair outside and sat daintily with a small piece of needlework. Humming, some silly song, no doubt, she made one perfect stitch after another.

 _The Long Night can descend to the world, and whoever is inside, dying, can dye happily for all she cares_ , or so the Gravedigger thought.

Happy to see a bird, even if she had no wings.

**Alayne**

It was unseemly but she felt as though she were being watched.

The arrival of the stranger from the North fractured her laboriously crafted inner peace and nearly pierced the well wrought armour of her courtesies. More dangerous than being a hostage, a role she was well trained in, was to have hope that some day it could be different.

Yet she had to have hope.

After all, was she not among the living where so many have died?

They were to travel south anyway and surely if the stranger went with them, it could not hurt. He could only be as bad as her present company. And if the monks truly went with them, her father would not have the opportunity to kiss her when he got better.

She pushed away the thought that her father could die as a dutiful daughter should, making another red stitch in the untainted white tissue.

 _Red like the blood of the earth_ , she remembered the words of a foreigner. He had seen the weirwoods of the north, she knew, white with red eyes; the bones and the blood of the land in which they grew.

It was not proper at all but she still felt as if she were being watched.

A thump could be heard from beneath the hill and she supposed some brothers of the Faith might have been working there. _Let them watch_ , she thought. Maybe monks were not so different from the ordinary men. The thought of a monk kissing her in place of her father was hilarious and almost ruined her next stitch.

She wondered what kind of song the unknown Northman had thought of, about a dragon prince and a wolf girl. He sang at the home of that other girl she was supposed to forget, but he wasn't working for that girl's father, that much was a given. He could not be trusted. She had never heard a song like the one he proposed.

It felt like she were someone else, watching herself, hiding not to be seen. It was so very unladylike to imagine the things that could not be, as if she were not entirely human.

As if she may have been a wolf.

Maybe if she played a part of a wolf girl for the sake of the make-believe, she could forget she was not a wolf any more, but a bird moved from one cage to another.

Whoever had been watching her, had been happy. Their presence was gone. She continued making regular stitches, red on white, slowly, methodically, one after another, with utmost correctness and application. The song she had been humming changed, coloured with the happiness someone else had perceived.

The rain came down heavily before nightfall. When she finally went in to check on her father, she went light on her feet, with her song still on her lips.


	3. The Good Knights of the House Corbray

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the show finally starts

**Mance**

_It was much better when it rained._

The sad realization hit Mance Rayder hard. He woke on a sunny morning and a company of fifty horsed knights, led by Ser Lyn Corbray, invaded the Quiet Isle, surrounding the cottage where the Lord Paragon of something could not be allowed to die in peace any longer. Several monks tried to resist with shovels. Their heads with glassy eyes now adorned the hastily raised wobbly spikes in the middle of the graveyard. The Brother Gravedigger hurried to dig enough holes to bury the rest of their desecrated remains as the Seven commanded, after the carnage.

Mance thought it was probably for the better that he overslept the onslaught, not to endanger his errand by a temptation of bravery, which lingered in every man. He grabbed his longsword, donned his cloak to hide it and joined the giant man, nodding slightly in his direction. The monk showed a presence of the mind to behave as if Mance's helping at the burial place was an ordinary thing, under the watchful eyes of the knights stationed on top of the hill.

Within the shapeless brown robes of the large monk, deep in the folds and over his back, a tool was packed. Not a shovel, nor an item of the Seven. Only a vague shape of the load he carried could be put together in one's mind, from many single looks measuring its size at different angles, when the big man moved.

The burden in itself was never visible. Mance soon knew beyond any doubt that the silent monk was hauling a greatsword, the deadliest weapon of Westeros.

"We've been trained in the same art, it would seem," Mance said, pivoting his body to let the other man come to the same conclusion about what was under his cloak.

The answer was silence.

 _Serves me right,_ Mance thought, _for talking to a silent brother of the Faith I don't keep._

"I thought you were a buggering singer," a rasp startled the King-beyond-the-Wall and the inner bard immediately studied the harsh sound for all its qualities. _A bit rough but it would most certainly do. It needs some refinement, but the low pitch would be good, coming from the stage._

Since Mance reshaped the song he wrote for the capital into a mummers' play in his sleepless spirit, he was well aware that no man in Westeros was noble enough to read the part of Rhaegar Targaryen.

"So you can speak," Mance said. "Excellent! I am Mance. And who are you?"

The brother who was no longer silent lowered his hood in a feral, savage motion.

 _Yes,_ Mance thought, observing the flaring temper of the Gravedigger, _with a few handpicked tricks this man will perform miracles in the role of Rhaegar. I won't find a better kneeler for it._

**Elder Brother**

Ser Lyn Corbray led the Elder Brother at spear point to the room where Lord Baelish was dying, and demanded brusquely, "We heard that you can do miracles for the ill. If he lives, then so will you."

"He refused my help when he arrived," the holy man said back.

"You would have poisoned me. You wanted to spread _lies_ about my daughter. Say it! Say that she's my daughter. She confirmed it herself!" the moribund hissed, his spirit still awake and well present among the living. "Alayne! Tell him again!"

"Father, you are very ill," the girl chirped, white as a snowflake melting mercilessly in a too warm land. She dwindled immediately behind the bed, like an obedient daughter, assuming the place and the humble stance belonging to women.

 _The breeding mares of the nobility at best, whores and expendable property of just about anyone at_ _worst._ The Elder Brother pushed the cruel thoughts away. They would always rise in his mind against his will, every time he saw the sick lord and his would-be-daughter.

"You heard her!" Baelish shouted with inhuman tone.

The Elder Brother sniffed the air and looked at the dying man's arm.

"Only one way to do it now," he said. "If he allowed me to help him before, we would have saved his arm. I suggest you do it, my lord, for we have no swords in Quiet Isle. I will bring some herbs to dress his wound when you are done. His fate is in the hands of the Seven now."

"Then so is yours, old fool," said Ser Lyn. "Go and get your herbs and pray that the Seven save him if you want to see another spring."

"My fate has been in the hands of the gods for a long time. I do not fear it," the monk said peacefully. "What happened to him, anyway?" he wondered, ignoring Corbray's menacing stance.

All eyes turned to the girl after the Elder Brother had spoken. It would seem that the brave knights did not know what had befallen their lord.

"A shadowcat, my lords," she spoke as it was proper, bowing slightly before her betters. "We took a road from the Vale not visited by the mountain clans, according to our guide, Ser Shadrich. Father and me spent a night in a cave, it must have been the beast's lair."

"You were with him?" asked Ser Lyn, incredulously.

"Yes," said the girl, blushing and lowering her eyes.

"Then how come that you are unharmed?"

"Father defended me from the monster and he chased it away. He was so brave!" replied the girl looking to the floor.

Baelish convulsed and shook his head, as if he wanted to refute her words, but his head dropped down on a meager pillow, where he mercifully lost consciousness.

"And here I thought that Littlefinger was as brave as I was!" Corbray laughed with total disrespect for his lord and main source of coin. "But it seems that even the cowards fight for their kin! Very well. Get out now, old man. And take her with you! What will happen in here is not for the eyes of any lady."

The monk shot a disapproving look at the young woman, but he still offered her his hand as a knight would. They left the cottage together and trod down the hill.

The Elder Brother looked back where the door of the hovel still gaped open.

Ser Lyn Corbray unsheathed his sword and took a good look at Baelish's arm, as if he were determining the best way to slaughter an aurochs for a great feast. Two of his men held their lord firmly in place.

Corbray aimed the blade towards the Lord Paramount's right shoulder and swung.

The shrill that came out of the cottage a second later would have woken up the murdered brothers, if the gods were good.

**Sandor**

Brother Gravedigger bared his face ferociously, in sign of acceptance. The time of hiding was over. He had to be who he was, Sandor Clegane, until his dying day.

The singer from the North didn't move a muscle and he just kept looking straight at the face of the Hound, burns and all. They did not become prettier with time. The Hound waited patiently, if not for revulsion, then for some cocky reaction typical of fellow killers when faced with one of the most renowned of their kind.

_Nothing._

_This man doesn't know me, he has never even heard about me,_ he realised. _He must be from somewhere very far up North._

"Mance," he rasped, "you told the Elder Brother you were from White Harbor."

"Yes."

"You lied."

The singer's eyes changed expression to the one Sandor knew; a vulture examining its prey.

"My name is Mance," the singer insisted. "What's yours?"

"If you don't know, I don't see why I should tell you," Clegane spat and swiftly raised his hood back to its place. He was barely on time before she could see him. All his attention turned to the cottage on the top of the hill the second _she_ walked out of it on Elder Brother's arm.

"Alright," said Mance, completely missing the reason for Sandor's mood swing. "I have a proposition for you now that you are more talkative than you've been of late."

The inhuman scream cut his words in half.

When it was over, Mance continued, undisturbed. "There. That sounded like I might be going south to the capital with both Baelish and his daughter. I need an aid."

"I'm not a buggering squire and I serve no one. I am my own dog now," said Sandor Clegane, slowly reborn as the Hound again, with every word he spoke.

He used all the willpower he had left to rein in the desire to go after her, as he was always compelled to do when in his cups in the Red Keep. Ever since he had told her the truth about his burns, and she was stunned to silence. But then she comforted him, innocently, unknowingly... The simple honesty in her scarce and always measured words had been a balm on all his wounds, better than any ointment had ever been.

"I'm not looking for a squire. Only for another man who can read. I presume you can do that much. She already agreed to help me read my songs," commented Mance, pointing at the odd couple walking down the hill.

"Songs are sweet lies for the weak," Sandor said boringly, as the words _she agreed_ burned red in his mind. _Of course she would have agreed to something like that. She will never learn!_

"Perhaps," the bard smiled. "But don't the weak deserve to have something for themselves? Lest their existence become unbearable..."

"I'll think about it," Sandor said flatly.

 _Reading songs with the bloody northerner might cheer up the little bird_ , he thought.  _Better that than travelling alone with Littlefinger and his pathetic servants, with thoughts of whoring on their mind._

Be as it may, Littlefinger's men were too many at that moment. One man wouldn't be able to kill them all, no matter how hard he tried. _The singer has a sword,_ Sandor thought, _and the Elder Brother is thinking of going south with some others. Not many are left alive after today. We might as well all leave for the winter._

Winter was coming.

Sandor threw his shovel into one of the holes, leaving a portion of the remains of his brothers laying unburied on the still wet soil. Absent-mindedly, he walked after the Elder Brother and the lady, trying to form a battle strategy in his mind.

"Won't you finish this?" Mance called after him, pointing at the mess he left behind.

"You do it, singer," Sandor replied coldly, pretending he wasn't looking back.

"First reading is this evening in the common room when all the good knights fall asleep!" he heard Mance shouting before the singer stooped, more like than not to pick up the abandoned shovel from the ground.

**Sansa**

"Will my father live?" she asked of the Elder Brother while eating her porridge with great elegance, as if she took part again in the seventy seven courses feast for the wedding of Joffrey Baratheon and Margaery Tyrell.

"He's not your father," he replied. "Admit the truth."

The nameless girl just put another spoonful of porridge in her mouth.

"All right," the Elder Brother seemed too tired to be angry at her for her cowardice, "I will see to it that he lives, but it's too early to tell. Does this make you happy?"

"Yes," she replied earnestly.

The Elder Brother gathered his herbs and some wine to boil for the wound. She called after him, hoping he would understand her, "It is not for us to decide who lives and who dies."

Sansa Stark knew that Petyr was the same as any of her previous gaolers, but she still couldn't bring herself to willingly commit or order a murder. A true king, or a true lord in the name of his king, could dictate a sentence by law for the man's crimes. By right, Petyr's punishment should be death.

But Sansa was no queen. She was afraid that the gaoler who would come next would be even worse than the one she already had.

The Elder Brother pushed his head back through the door, despite that he had already stepped out.

"I almost forgot," he said. "The singer asked me to tell you to stay in the common room tonight after supper. For a reading exercise."

"Gladly," she said, "if you would please do me a kindness to stay at my father's side tonight."

"I will" the monk replied. "And I will make sure that all the good knights know that it's not fit for a lady to spend a night in that cottage.

"Thank you," Sansa Stark said, and meant her courtesies.

xxxxxx

"So this is how we do it," the Northman called Mance commanded, "you just read from the parchments I gave to each of you. You start," he pointed at the hooded man who joined them in the common room after dinner in the late hour of the evening. "And then you read the next line," he told Sansa who hoped she would be able to act as this wolf girl and not like Petyr's daughter. "And so we continue until the end. Is that clear?"

Sansa looked expectantly at the man she was to read with. They were both seated in front of the singer. The brother of the Faith was completely hidden in his robes, but even so it was obvious that he must have been very tall. A single candle shed some light into the room from the table behind them.

Another tall man came into Sansa's mind, the one from her old life, when the fire burned green in the skies amidst the dead and the dying. The one who left her and whom she should forget. And he didn't believe in any gods, the old, or the new.

An unnatural voice broke the silence after Mance's speech. It was not at all what she expected to hear.

"They say that Winterfell is cold, my lady, and that no flowers grow among its walls."

"That may be so," she read back, disappointed.

"How is it then that one has grown outside?" the voice recited his part with indifference.

"Noooo!" Mance interrupted them, disapproving. "That is not your own voice, good brother of the Faith. Imagine that you are telling me to dig graves like you did this afternoon, not that you are talking to your dead mother. You have no tenderness for her at this moment, you're just bleating empty courtesies due to a lady. And you, my lady, you hate courtesies and you will make him see it. Again!"

"They say that Winterfell is cold, my lady, and that no flowers grow among its walls," rasped the voice Sansa heard so often in her dreams.

"That may be so," she raised her head defiantly as she would never do in any of her roles in life, attacking the darkness under his hood with a flash of her bright blue Tully eyes.

"How is it then that one has grown outside?" the voice mocked her as it always did in the Red Keep. Her heart was stuck in her throat.

"How do you know that I am not a lady of this castle?" she asked, trying to sound as her sister Arya would, forcing her spine straight.

"A lady would not be seen outside training with the lance. Weapons are for men," he leaned closer from his chair, breathing the hateful comment out with cruel certainty and unhidden intention to hurt her with his words.

He was successful and Sansa no longer needed to pretend. The words she read were flowing, no matter how harsh they sounded for a lady she always tried so hard to be.

"Do you consider yourself a man?"

"Isn't it obvious? I am one."

"Then where is your weapon, man? You seem to have forgotten it. There are foul things in the woods of Winterfell waiting for pretty knights like yourself. You should run back behind the walls while you still can and leave the free folk in peace."

"Are you a wildling then?" the Hound sounded as if he could barely contain a mirth in his voice from seeing her so... openly angry... for the first time.

"Perhaps," she said; polite, perfect and false once more.

It was the last sentence written on the parchment in Sansa's hands. Her eyes were blazing and the Hound seemed even more withdrawn then usual.

"Much better," said Mance, satisfied. "You're both getting a taste of this. We'll leave it at that for tonight."

"If I may make a suggestion," the friendly, balanced voice of the Elder Brother said from the door. "I came to accompany the lady to her new quarters for the night-"

"-My father? Sansa asked, joining her hands anxiously.

"Still with us and not yet with the gods. Ser Lyn Corbray and the young squire are keeping him company for the moment," the Elder Brother reassured her. "But, please, about your play at the end of the first scene, I think it would sound better if he asks her 'A wildling? Is that who you are? I've heard they are wicked and know no gods.' And when she answers 'Perhaps' which was very good, then he should end the conversation saying 'If we ever meet again, I will name you the Wild Rose of Winterfell and you will know me for who I am.'"

"Not bad for a monk. No singers in the family?" Mance nodded in approval. "The two of you, are you willing to try again, from the end of the scene?"

"You have never told us the how the characters are called," said Sansa. "I suppose they must have names."

"There will be plenty of time for that. I want you to get used to the story before you know whom you are playing in truth," said Mance. "Who knows, maybe you will guess who you are as the story is being told. Let's do it again, say it as the Elder Brother wanted."

"Don't expect me to repeat _that_ ," stated the voice from under the hood, unnatural and hushed once more, the rasp hidden.

"Why not, by the old gods?" asked Mance. "You were doing fine. We will all make lots of coin if you keep up the good work. It's just words and the words are wind!"

"Please," Sansa said, glancing demurely at her partner. "It's only a song."

She sank back on her chair and, slowly, the tall brother did the same.

Deep silence reigned in the room and the candle seemed afraid to keep burning.

"You, singer," the voice rasped. "Can I stand and say these new words of yours?"

"By all means, suit yourself," Mance encouraged him, waving a hand.

So Sandor Clegane towered over Sansa and asked her in his true voice burned off by the fire years ago, just like half of his face had been, "A wildling? Is that who you are? I've heard they are wicked and know no gods."

"Perhaps," she replied rising up on her feet to face him, unable to see him under the cowl, and yet yearning to do so, wishing her voice to sound careless and not to betray her pounding heart.

He dared take one of her hands in his own before he pronounced the final words very slowly, as if he had to try hard to remember them correctly, with the unintended consequence that they sounded as if every word was important to him.

"If we ever meet again, I will name you the Wild Rose of Winterfell and you will know me for who I am."

Sandor finished talking, let her hand go, and with the slightest nod to Mance and the Elder Brother stormed away into the night without another word.

"This brother is a natural in this art despite himself!" Mance whistled. "And your counsel was a solid one for a man of the Faith."

"I was only a man once," said the Elder Brother.

Mance took a quill from his belt and touched the shoulders of the Elder Brother, mocking the gesture performed when a man was knighted, "I, Mance without a Realm, by the grace of the old gods Lord of this Mummers' Show, appoint you, Elder Brother of the Seven, to serve on my small council and grace it with your advice, until such day that I release you from your duties."

"And I, Elder Brother of the Quiet Isle, gladly accept," said their host, dropping on one knee in make-believe.

Sansa was grateful that men sometimes indulged in childish behaviour because none of them saw how she had to fight off the urge to faint. The words of a song about someone else, spoken to her by the Hound, alive and well from what it seemed, thrummed like thoughts of treason in her captive mind.


	4. As It Once Was

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Sandor and Sansa start from the beginning

**Sansa**

When the Elder Brother left, bidding her good night, it occurred to Sansa that maybe the Hound would have followed him to see her. If he recognized her, as she did him. So she closed the door, but she didn't bolt it, and she didn't ready herself for bed, unwilling to be seen by him in any state of undress, yet strangely hopeful that he would appear.

The waiting took long and she dozed on a chair occupying the remnants of the small space in the cell between the bed and the door, oblivious to the night's chill.

It could have been the hour of the wolf when the inside air stirred, thick with dust.

Sansa could not hear him but he must have been there for a while, in front of the door, immobile as when he stood guard in front of the king. She took her chamber pot, empty, hoping he wouldn't notice that in the darkness. It was the only reasonable excuse for a lady to unbar her door at that hour of the night. He stepped aside when she opened it and she was suddenly frightened of him and of her foolish ideas. So she left the pot in front, daintily, and made several steps backward, leaving the door open; a clumsy invitation hung wordless in the air.

He took the hint for what it was and entered in two long strides, closing the cell behind him.

Sansa wanted to look up, but she found that she could only stare at her feet.

"Your hair is different," he said, blunt as ever, no lords and ladies in his treatment of people. Just men, and women and children, all made of the same flesh.

"Father says it's better so that people would not see the truth," she said in a meek voice.

"I instantly saw who you were."

"It would please me to say that I saw who you were as well, but that would not be true," she said, daring a small look upwards. She felt hatred oozing from under his cowl so she rapidly continued before it would grow. "I believe that you still don't have a fondness for lies. In truth, I instantly _heard_ who you were."

The Hound exhaled a peculiar sounding grunt and she realized that it must have been a short burst of uncontrolled _friendly_ laugh, something she had never heard him do before, as far as she could remember. Her opinion of how ugly it sounded must have been clearly written all over her face because what followed was the wrathful repulsiveness of his words.

"They say that the little bird killed King Joffrey and flew away to the Free Cities with her Imp husband, a proper little Lady Lannister and a dutiful wife to him."

"They also say that the Hound slaughtered and violated innocents in Saltpans. They say that he mutilated them and let them burn," she replied in kind.

"People lie," Sandor barked back.

"That they do," she offered him a weak smile, half looking at him, half not. It was the best she could do. She wondered why he didn't lower his hood. _I could do it,_ an erratic thought crossed her mind but she decided against it. _It could anger him further._ "Please, excuse me for the night," she said instead, her voice weaker than she would have wanted it, her courage from the reading dissolved in the dark. "The day was exhausting and I would like to rest."

He surprised her by obedience. When she watched him open and close the door again, Sansa was overwhelmed. Whatever had been between them, stayed exactly as it once was.

**Elder Brother**

Two days after the rain had finally stopped the Elder Brother was about to leave the cell he had called his home for almost twenty years. He constructed a place of safety for the children of the Seven in the lost part of the riverlands, where the Trident flushed him out after the battle in which Robert Baratheon won his kingdom.

His recollections from his life before the battle were sketchy. He knew that he liked women and most likely fathered children in the rose lands of Highgarden. His name had been Randyll, named for Lord Tarly, famous in military prowess, but the Elder Brother had been a simple soldier. The wound he took when he fell into the Trident was so grievous that it was a miracle he survived. The experience washed his previous life away. He had no desire to return to it and instead he felt he had to dedicate all his considerable energies to the people of the realm.

Someone _had_ to, and so few were willing.

His work doubled with the War of the Five Kings.

He owed his life to the patience of the Elder Brother before him, an ancient weak man, short of stature, who looked like he had been made of paper and not of skin and bone. The Elder Brother laid his saviour to rest many years ago. A weakness of the heart descended upon the thin man and took him in a whisper, like a cold winter breeze sweeping the fields and reaping the last flowers of the long summer.

"Hurry up, brother," the singer, Mance, called after the Elder Brother through the open window. "We have to go before the new rain starts."

Mance was followed by the boy squire of Lord Baelish, a sickly lad who sometimes convulsed in the mud with foam on his lips. Yet only Ser Shadrich dared tease him, and the Corbray men kept their distance.

The clouds grew dense, sailing on the sky in elaborate, admirable patterns of dark grey. The harsh autumn colours made the Elder Brother pack faster. The journey ahead would be trying in the cold season. 

After the battle, the Trident had also brought to the river bank a leather bag with his belongings, very few of them and none of any valour. The monk took it from under his cot and examined his broken treasures. He only looked at them once after he had woken in the Quiet Isle and never touched them since.

First and foremost, there was a broken lance. Against the monk's expectation, it still fitted in his arm, despite that he was now a man of peace. Next came the short dagger blade of battered, yet dully shining steel, whose hilt got ripped off and most likely stolen; and a sharp black stone, which might have been a good luck charm of some kind in his previous life of the man of the world. The dagger and the stone belonged together, he remembered. He had probably won them unhorsing his opponent on some small holdfast tourney,  open to hedge knights. Finally, there were two loose strings; pertaining to a harp, maybe. The metal of the strings glimmered slightly in the bright light of the morning. _Perhaps I should leave all this behind,_ he thought.

"I am a falcon," the boy said to the singer outside. "And I also want to read your songs, Alayne told me she can do it, and if she can do it, than I can also do it by right."

"Listen, boy," Mance said , "you know what mummers do, don't you?"

"They play and show what happened to other people who are not they."

"Essentially, yes. And you know there has to be a person each mummer represents," Mance said with uncharacteristic patience, more common for his horse. "In my play there is no boy of eleven, so there is nothing for you to read."

"Did you finish your play?" asked the boy, not giving up.

"Not quite, but-"

"-Then maybe a boy will appear in the story before the end. I want to read with Alayne. She was always telling me stories. I will be a knight and wed her one day."

"Come on, boy, let's pack," said Mance, laughing wholeheartedly. "You said you wanted to ride. If you don't want to work with me, I will leave you to Ser Shadrich or load you on the wagon with the Lord Protector."

The boy shut up and followed him around without another word.

The Elder Brother felt endeared with the conversation and thought that, out there, there would always be people in need of guidance. Perhaps he did not need the Quiet Isle to labour in the name of the Seven, in the sign of gratitude for the gift of life they had bestowed upon him, not once, but twice.

And the Seven for some reason saw to it that he also received an inheritance of broken things of the life that was once his. With steadfast belief that things in life mostly happened for a reason, though it was not always easy to see one, the Elder Brother transferred his possessions into a half full saddlebag. He hid the strings particularly well, deep on one of the sides. _The singer would not let me live if he knew I had this_ , he thought.  _He would not let me rest until I agreed to accompany his play by my music. Seven save me, he would give me his lute._

The Seven preferred the crystal radiance of silence, visible in the elaborate glasswork which adorned their septs. And the chant of voices united in hymns. No sound of an instrument should be allowed to disturb the holy places. The thought that once he could play _music_ was so offensive and contradictory to nature. The Elder Brother firmly rejected it when he stepped out of the door, with the saddlebag hung safely over his shoulders.

**Mance**

"Come on, the two of you, we don't have all night. Even the horses need to sleep after today's ride," Mance Rayder said impatiently. "Did you try the masks I gave you before we departed?"

Both of his recently recruited players held out traditional wildling masks carved out of white weirwood; the outer border of the slits for eyes and mouth was drawn in a thick line of bright red paint made from its sap. The big monk looked as if he might accidentally squash his disguise, and the lady, Jon's sister, was uncertain about what to do with it. _I have to be pleased that they didn't forget them or lose them,"_ thought Mance, trying to calm down. "I hope that yours is big enough, brother. The previous owner had been a large fellow as well." _A young giant,_ Mance pondered with sadness, _dead in the war that might yet kill us all._

"Put them on, don't be afraid!" he told them. "The next scene takes place on the battlements, I still have to decide of which fortress, but it should be somewhere far up north. Any ideas?"

"How could they have any?" asked the voice of the mocking bird who had had himself carried to the rehearsal on his sleeping pallet by a pair of particularly brainless looking knights. "A brother of the Faith from the gods forsaken riverlands and a noble bastard from the Fingers? What do they know of the north? So _inhospitable_ and far away."

"Would you, Lord Protector, know of such fortress from your many travels and great wisdom?" asked Mance, unhappy about the company. "Preferably one close to the Wall."

"How about Queensgate?" asked Baelish's squire, who wouldn't leave Mance's side since they started their journey together. "They say it used to be a beautiful castle in the snow, visited by the Good Queen Alysanne."

"A well educated squire, my lord," said Mance, staring at Baelish, waiting for his reaction, not receiving any.

"I am a falcon," bleated the boy.

"What does my Small Council say?" Mance asked of the Elder Brother who was the last one to arrive to the clearing among weak trees and bushes, where the King-beyond-the-Wall was trying to hold a second reading of his play.

They camped in a thicket next to a stream, one day ride south from the Quiet Isle. Corbray and his men were either resting or standing guard. The few remaining monks huddled under a canopy of a large tree, far away from the good knights who had murdered their brothers, not willing to draw any undue attention to their continued existence.

"Queensgate is very well, I think," the head of the monks observed. "It is important in the history of the Seven Kingdoms."

"Who knows," said Mance, "my song may yet be as widely known as the life or the Good Queen Alysanne." He was pleased to note that the arrival of Baelish prompted both his Rhaegar and his Lyanna to hastily don their masks. Mance still didn't know their real names so he allowed himself the freedom of calling them by their mummers' roles in his mind. The old disguise of the North made them look more poised and confident in their bearing; tall and fearsome for the watching eyes. "Go on," he encouraged them. "Read. You start this time, my lady."

Lyanna and Rhaegar stood facing each other as if they measured how their new attire changed them. A few knights joined the small circle of watchers in a lack of a better thing to do.

"A betrothal is the highest honour for a daughter of a great house," Jon's sister started reading, meticulously, betraying no feelings.

"Yet you don't believe it now, my lady."

"No," she said, turning her back to would-be Rhaegar. "Not any more."

Mance interrupted: "Please, read from the parchment. Do not invent the words!"

"I am sorry," Jon's sister said, "I must have misread. I am not used to reading to more than one or two people at the time."

"Always so shy," Baelish added cheerfully from behind. The man's inquisitive nature was apparently not bothered in the least by the loss of his right arm. Since he woke and rose from bed, he was in charge of overseeing all preparations for their trip to King's Landing. Lyn Corbray turned taciturn and was no longer in command. Mance didn't favour that development a single bit, but for the time being he had to play along.

"My lord," he said calmly, "let them read. You may yet find the spectacle enjoyable."

**Sandor**

Sansa read from the parchment, slowly, deliberately, _wishing to avoid another mistake_ , the Hound supposed. "My betrothed is said to be a man who drinks, and gambles and whores, and who will surely shame his wife. What is honourable about his condition?"

"Maybe he will love you," Sandor rasped back.

"He might, in time," she conceded.

"Still, you are troubled," Sandor began to wonder what her next line would be. They each saw written only their own part. The singer said it was better like that, it would make their reactions more forthcoming.

"What of my own wishes? What if I wanted to drink, and gamble and whore before my betrothal? And what if I don't love him in time?"

"Most unseemly thoughts for a lady," Sandor read, perplexed as to where the conversation was leading. "Would you do all that if you could?"

"No," she said as if she meant every word. "I just wish that the choice was mine and not a mere opinion of the world of what a lady should do."

"My parchment says 'halt' now," Sandor said to Mance, unsure how to proceed. _I am good in killing,_ he thought, _not in guessing this fool's intentions._

"That means that you should wait a bit for the lady to continue," Mance urged the scene on. "You could offer her a meaningful look. There. Good. Just like that. As if you were waiting for her next words."

"Who are you?" she asked with more freedom, forgetting that Littlefinger was watching her every move. "And why did you follow me to the battlements of the Queensgate? Men don't come to this castle since it was abandoned because it brings bad luck. It is said that the spirit of the Good Queen Alysanne will curse any man who ventures here to lose all he holds dear, his lands, his children, or his wife."

"You put wife last. Do you think that men think so little of their wives?" Sandor replied.

"Most do not think of them at all," Sansa's voice rang like music on a feast, determined and relentless. "You haven't answered my question. Who are you and why are you here?"

"Might be I came here because I also am troubled and seek solitude like you seem to be doing, my lady," Sandor hated reading his reply. He would never admit such a thing to anyone, even if it was occasionally true.

"Then why won't you show me your face?" she asked him, gently, in a voice Sandor recognised as the one she reserved only for Joffrey when she was much too young for her own good, and fell in love with the golden prince.

"Maybe next time," he said, taking in the warmth of her voice selfishly for himself, glad it were the last words on his parchment for that night.

"Very good," said Mance. "Queensgate it is. The lady says the name so sweetly."

"Can I now be on the show? I helped you with that name," asked the squire, hopeful and eager as only young boys could be.

The crowd of knights and brothers slowly increased in number around them while the scene was being read. A knight whistled his discontent. "Give us more, singer," he said. "The night is too cold to lay down and sleep."

"Let the brave knight kiss the lady," another ventured. "What kind of show is that if there's no kissing?"

Sandor only had eyes for Sansa under the cowl and the mask, completely ignoring the others. When the crowd finally disbanded before Mance's staunch refusal to make them rehearse some more, and Littlefinger was carried away, Sansa started towards the wagon where she was to sleep. He followed two steps behind her, silent, as if she were a princess, and he her sworn shield.

He stood guard in front of the wagon until he was certain that she had fallen asleep. Only then he sat down to rest, on the cold muddy ground, falling back to his old soldier habits. His back found comfort alongside a young tree, in memory of a time passed, when he had nearly died like that, calling her name in his agony.


	5. A Shadowcat and a Grumkin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the unknown comes to haunt the company travelling south

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Violence in this chapter. There are more violent stories around but I prefer to tell.

**Mance**

"We need more players," said Mance to the Elder Brother in desperation. "My tale is asking for more faces to be told in full."

They thought they were about to ride further down south, on a cold, crisp morning, much too chilled for the autumn in the riverlands, when they discovered that the knights had left them in silence long before dawn, taking with them the horses they had stolen from the surviving brothers of the Quiet Isle. Four of those were set to drag the wagon with Baelish, Jon's sister and the squire, judging by the trail.

The monks continued their journey on foot, with no hope to catch up with Baelish and his party, all except the one playing Rhaegar whose black beast did not let itself be stolen. The horse had embarked on a furious pursuit with his rider before the rest of them woke up. They could now see him in the distance; a black monster on the horizon, not too far behind the last knights in Baelish's company, despite the significant advantage they had in departing.

"It seems like you have just lost all your players," deemed the Elder Brother.

Mance still had his sturdy brown horse too, but he knew that the odds of that animal overtaking Baelish were very low. He almost wished he was back up north, with the wights of the dead on his tail, and the white walkers approaching in the frozen dread of the night, because there, then, he could never sleep. He had always been alert and on edge. The false safety south of the Wall had already cheated on him twice to miss an important change of tide. _The third time could cost me my skin_ , he thought, scratching the healing injuries on the back of his legs.

"Let's move out and see what players we can find," Mance said. "We shouldn't linger. The night smelled much too cold for my liking."

"I wager we will not see the Brother Gravedigger or Lord Baelish and his daughter again," said one of the other monks, a young and scrawny creature called Robert, in honour of the late king.

"I'll wager my horse that we will," offered Mance, not expecting an answer.

"I will take you on your offer," said the Elder Brother. "I am not pleased by the prospect of walking to the capital for the queen's trial."

"And what will you give me if you loose your bet?" said the King-beyond-the-Wall all of a sudden, with great, unmasked interest.

"I have nothing of value to give. Ask of me any service I can provide as a payment."

"If I win, you and two of your monks will play the three brothers of the lady in my tale," said Mance, accomplished, viciously shaking the bony long arm of the Elder Brother to seal the arrangement. The limb felt warm under the robes the monk never took off, Mance reckoned.

"At least two of her brothers lived more chastely than any servant of any faith I've ever met," he reassured the Elder Brother, "so the roles shouldn't pose you too much of a difficulty."

**Sandor**

The gnats camped at the beginning of a large forest of tall slender birches close to the plains, giving way to centenary oaks further behind, not even half a day of good ride from where they had abandoned the brothers to their grim fate. As many times before, Sandor was grateful for the overconfidence of the knights when they thought that the people from whom they stole and whom they slaughtered were defenceless lambs.

 _I am not a lamb, my lords,_ he thought. _And tonight_ _I may well be the butcher for the likes of you._

He would not commit the same mistake as they, arrogantly attacking alone and in daylight. He needed the shelter of the darkness and the buggering singer and the Elder Brother to help him.

For if he let the little bird be towed away, against her will from what could be suspected, she would never finish reading her part of the song, fond as she was of such foolish things. And only the Seven would know, if they existed, what Littlefinger intended to do with her. _He'll do her no good_ , Sandor thought, creeping around Sansa's captors without being seen, lithe, light-footed and quick despite his height. His black horse, Stranger, was left to roam free on the safe distance where the honourable thieving knights could not see him.

When he learned all he could about the grounds and the enemy position in a short time, he fell back and rode like in seven hells, until he saw the singer and his brothers. The monks trudged forward trough the omnipresent mud, created by the incessant rain, and then torn open like a freshly excavated grave by the horses' hooves and the wagon wheels.

"Singer," he exclaimed, "you want your show to go on and we want our horses back. King's Landing is far away from here."

"That much is true," Mance agreed.

"This is what we will do," Sandor said in a voice of a captain of men that broke no disagreement, and all fell silent to listen to his plan.

xxx

"My blood runs cold," said one of the brothers whom the others called Norbert, when they were crawling through the low bushes towards the edge of the wood where Baelish and his party had stopped for the night.

"You don't know what you're talking about, brother," commented Mance. "It is in the north that the man's blood freezes before his very life is taken away by the dread of old, forgotten in your lands until the day the Wall falls, and the terror of ice comes south to consume you all."

"Shut up, both of you," Sandor snarled, trying to keep his own voice down as well. "No more talk of snarks and grumkins or I will cut your tongues out. Do you want them to hear us? Surprise is the only advantage we'll have. He has fifty armed men over there." Mance and Sandor spent most of the day riding double to bring all the brothers close enough to the woods, with the result that both of their horses were exhausted.   _So far, so good,_ Sandor thought.  The horses would not be of much use in the night raid. But if the knights prevailed, they would have no means to outrun them.

Behind the next bush, the Elder Brother gripped a hiltless dagger and looked troubled.

"Think of this as a different kind of song, brother," Sandor told him with uncharacteristic politeness the monk sometimes inspired in him, by being too noble for his own good. "We will write our words in blood on their skins. Just follow my lead."

The Elder Brother shook his head. "The Seven do not approve of taking lives."

"They don't approve of many things that come to pass," Sandor Clegane rasped back with annoyance. "And your task is not to take any. Just go straight to Baelish and point your dagger at his throat. He'll not know if it's a blunt one. You only have to make him fear for his little life."

The other brothers, not more than fifteen survivors from the Quiet Isle, were armed with sticks and such tools they brought with them, in an effort not to leave any valuable goods for plunder.

"I hope your steel is still sharp, singer," the Hound noted as they encircled the wagon where Littlefinger must have been sleeping.

In guise of an answer, Mance jumped from behind on the two guards in front of the wagon, cutting one's throat and knocking the other unconscious with the scabbard of his longsword.  _It's carved out of the same white wood like those bloody masks_ , Sandor noticed.

"Seems sharp to me," said the singer as the monks completely surrounded the wagon.

The Elder Brother ventured inside and Sandor and Mance stood back to back in front of it, waiting for the other knights to wake up and resist them. The face of the northerner turned feral in the moonlight. Sandor straightened instinctively to his full height; his sword unsheathed next to Mance's, his terrible burnt face hidden by a monk's cowl.

Sandor was truly proud of the Elder Brother who soon dragged out a furious Littlefinger, calling on his mercenaries for help in cold blood, despite the dagger poised expertly on his throat. The little bird in a thick grey travelling dress followed behind on her two feet; her too dark hair loose all over her tiny elongated back.

"We want our horses and the girl," said Mance to the cravens who surrounded them by that time, finding strength in numbers, swords at ready. "Or we will kill him and you will lose all coin he promised to pay to you in the capital."

They agreed earlier that the singer would talk. He was better with words than the Hound, and the Elder Brother was simply not gifted for the kind of conversation their situation would surely require.

The knights seemed undecided and the ones standing in the back started to point at the woods. Sandor sensed a chill crawling upon him, of a kind he had never felt in his life. He exhaled and the air came out of his lungs as a puff of smoke, white and blue.

 _So this_   _is winter,_ Sandor thought.

He was born in winter but the long summer started shortly after Gregor shoved his face into the fire, so he had no memories of the season. And by the account of the old maester in his father's keep the last winter was short-lived and mild.

 _This must be proper winter, then,_ Sandor thought, morbidly enthralled with the icy sensation in his veins, ignoring the danger he knew it must contain. The air smelled sharp as if it held hidden blades, aimed straight at his battle hardened heart.

His body felt movement behind him in the woods before his mind did. In a sweeping motion, he turned back and hacked at the still invisible opponent with his greatsword, glad that he honed it daily in the Quiet Isle. His reflexes saved his life, because the creature that attacked him continued to claw after him with brute force despite that he had severed one of its arms. It had human form but it was not made of living flesh. Its eyes looked dark blue. _Dead_.

He noticed Mance battling several more foes of the same sort with deadly precision. The monks and the brave knights just stood by and watched.

 _Waiting for these things to do their killing,_ thought Sandor, as he cut both his first opponent and two more into small pieces twitching on the ground.

The singer was also doing a deft job, and the battle should have been over because no more enemies came from the woods.

Yet the frostiness kept increasing beyond measure, and Sandor's blood nearly froze when he looked down into a pair of eyes, wide open on the detached head of one of the creatures on the ground. They had the blue colour of ice from the Imp's stories and descriptions of the great land beyond the Wall. Sandor had secretly listened to the dwarf's tale while standing guard for King Joffrey, to endure the tedium of the never ending royal meals and functions.

Sandor realised that the loose limbs and body parts he'd just butchered belonged to his murdered brothers from the Quiet Isle whom they had buried in the cold ground only two days ago. Had his soul been just a little less harsh, he would have dropped his sword and emptied his belly. The singer seemed unaffected by what they had done; he just stared far ahead, towards the plains next to the river they had crossed together earlier that day, following Baelish and his men.

A lone white figure approached from the distance, from the flat muddy land behind the woods Sandor and his companions had left behind when heading south. The horses started whinnying; several tore the ropes they were tethered with, and wildly ran away.

The forest _howled_ as if it were born to a life of a giant beast. The sound of horse hooves was replaced by a thud of many fast paws on the moss growing low and green between the scattered trees.

In a blink of an eye they were surrounded by a numerous pack of wolves. A huge grey leader padded forward, passing among the knights who didn't dare touch it, straight towards Littlefinger, and sniffed him. The Elder Brother did not release his hold on the former master of coin.

 _There's no need for it any longer,_ the Hound mused _._

The wet stain on the front of Baelish's sleeping breeches, revealed shamelessly by the full moon, said everything about the Lord Protector's valiant condition.

 _At least he shut up,_ Sandor concluded gingerly, curious about what the beast would do next.

The beast sniffed Mance and howled its approval to the singer, almost bowing to the ground. Mance smiled at it and caressed the hair behind its ears, as if he was familiar with the wolf.

 _Not a wolf,_ Sandor realised.

The giant _direwolf_ prowled to Sandor and snarled, slowly circling around its prey, ready to attack and kill. Sandor grasped his sword and waited for the animal to make the first move. He wanted to defend his life, yet killing the wolf felt wrong and he would not do it if he could. In a corner of his eye, Sandor saw that the singer tried to turn the wolf's attention away by throwing dry broken branches, accidentally in the direction of the white apparition, which was still approaching, advancing very slowly across the plain.

But the wolf only had eyes for Sandor, and the Hound knew in his guts that it was after his blood.

It began to snow.

Gracious white crystals drifted downwards from the dark sky, not caring about the world of men or their miserable lives.

 _If I fall,_ thought Sandor, _my blood will redden the snow. Will she like the look of it? Will she find it pleasing? Or will she cry because that is what the ladies do when someone dies?_

His chain of thoughts was interrupted by an old blind dog who used to accompany him when digging graves, and who stepped, seemingly out of nowhere, between Sandor and the beast.

The dog bayed insistently as if it wanted to speak but it could not. The beast nuzzled the dog and they rolled together in the mud like a ball; the big and small fur mingling together, the wolf taking care not to hurt the older smaller animal it played with.

And then, swift and strong like a thunder, the giant wolf disentangled itself and leaped forward. It jumped at the Elder Brother with calculated precision. Tearing the saddlebag from his shoulder, the animal massacred its contents with all four paws, over the dirt and human remains that were slowly getting cleansed by the maidenly white blanket of snow.

The direwolf growled to the singer, as if it said farewell, and then it sprinted away, followed closely by its pack. The infernal bunch stormed into the plain, running over the strange apparition in the distance, until all that was left of any of them was a new trail of many paws, and a layer of most unusual transparent crystals floating in the air, raining down to the ground, mingled with the petals of fresh snow.

The old blind dog limped into the little bird's arms. Sandor realised that was where it came from to begin with.

"What was that?" It was Lyn Corbray and not Baelish the first one who managed to speak. He unsheathed his sword only at that very moment when the battle was definitely over.

"Nothing important, my lord," the little bird answered with unwavering courtesy, cradling the dog as an old, long lost friend. "The shadowcat has just killed the grumkin in the fields of the Trident. Haven't you seen it?"

"Was it the same shadowcat that attacked you on the way from the Vale?" inquired the Elder Brother, still holding a shivering Baelish by his throat.

"We have to burn them," Mance said before the little bird could answer, showing the body parts becoming half hidden by snow. "No graves for the brothers. I'm sorry but it has to be that way."

Sandor was grateful that no digging was required for the time being and he went to look for Stranger, letting Mance and the brothers the honours of making the funeral pyre. When he passed the place where the ghostlike foe had appeared, he noticed a small, sharp black stone laying abandoned on the ground. Not knowing what it was, he picked it up and stored it in a small pouch on his belt where he always kept his honing stone. Stranger was not far behind, resting with the singer's brown mount in an idyllic harmony only animals could share.

 _Why can't it be that simple with people?_ thought Sandor, returning to the camp with both horses.

After the Battle with the Dead as the men immediately began calling it, none of the Corbray's men wanted to face Sandor or Mance in a fair fight, no matter what Baelish tried to say after he changed his sullied breeches. They whispered behind their backs that the bard from the north and the giant brother of the Faith were as unnatural as the Young Wolf once was, and that they could summon and command the army of beasts by a clap of their hands.

So they continued travelling south through the night as one company, not united by a common cause, or by obedience to a common lord. What kept them together was a common sense of fear. They were afraid of one another and of what was out there, lurking in the night. Baelish was pleasantly silent. The little bird kept the old dog close by on the wagon, and Sandor heard the singer talking cheerfully to the Elder Brother about how he and his monks should prepare to take part in the next reading of the play.

Sandor found, against his own expectations in the matter, that he also was eager to continue the buggering reading.

Contrary to his wishes, the singer informed him he was not to take part in a scene they would read in the morning, before resting after the entire night's ride. Despite that, when they finally stopped, Sandor was glad he could just sit down on his thick brotherly cloak in the shallow snow, and watch his little bird graciously ruffle her feathers before the play would start.

 _Pretty grey wings to go with her new hair colour, just as they should be, not the vain luxury of Lannister red and gold,_ he mused, drowsy, with all his muscles beginning to ache from the moment he allowed his body to relax after the efforts of the night. His quiet joy increased when he saw the singer becoming upset with the players again.

For once, Sandor was not the cause.

"Can't you read?" Mance said in disbelief. "I thought you all learned your letters in these southern kingdoms. We're not in the wild north your lords proclaim to be barbaric because of its prayers to the trees."

Two of Sandor's brothers simply gazed forward, and the Elder Brother must have felt obliged to speak in their defence. "Most of the brothers are sons of peasants, they have seen no keep, or a man who knows his letters in their lives."

"If I tell you the words, can you learn them by heart?" Mance asked the young skinny Brother Robert and the sturdy Brother Norbert, originally from somewhere in the Vale. The two of them, together with the Elder Brother, were selected to play the three brothers of Sandor's lady love in the silly show.

Mance went behind the trees with the new mummers to agree what they should be saying. The interruption gave Sandor more precious time to savour the silence of the little bird reading the next scene eagerly from her parchment, not for any public, only for herself.

 _She is truly enjoying this,_ he understood, and it gave him more joy. He would keep up with the stupid readings, geld that bastard Littlefinger if she asked, or battle all the snarks from the North single-handed, just to keep her smiling.

"Your betrothed is a good man," said the Elder Brother to the lady when the reading began.

"Has he told you that when you were in taverns together?" Sansa read back.

"He may seem lecherous, but his heart is strong and pure. We were fostered together. I know him better than my own brothers. He would die for me and I for him."

"Why don't you marry him then, dear brother?"

"I will take the black when you are married and when our older brother becomes lord. It is honourable and fitting for the second son."

"And I will seek out the will of the old gods in their sacred domains in the north," peeped the skinny Brother Robert playing the youngest brother.

"And I will have many women from the Seven Kingdoms in my bed before I commit to lordship and the burden of marriage," thundered the sturdy Brother Norbert, staggering ludicrously on his feet, exaggerating in emotion. Mance ran to the stage and stopped them, dishevelling his hair in discontent. The sentence had to be repeated many times before it sounded confident and manly enough in the singer's opinion.

Sandor was tired and simply happy to watch his little bird without having to stand guard for any king. The dress hid her body and the mask her face, so Sandor gazed at her hands holding the parchment. Her skin was unblemished like those weird white weirwoods he had seen in the north, entangling their branches in the groves with those of the other, lesser trees; the wonder of nature he would never have witnessed if the late King Robert didn't force almost his entire court to travel to Winterfell. The Hound had known ever since that the godswood in King's Landing was but a dwarf cousin of the great forests of the north.

"I will do my duty," Sansa read. "As will all of you one day. But my heart is not in it."

"Where is your heart then, sweet sister?" the second son asked, through the mouth of the Elder Brother.

"Left in the ruins of Queensgate with the cold northern winds," Sansa smiled wickedly at her would-be brothers, and her eyes examined the small crowd watching the scene when she read the last words, as if she was searching for something. Or someone.

 _She is looking at me,_ Sandor thought, worse, he was certain. _Easy to do that now with my cowl always on, isn't it so, little bird?_

Brother Norbert turned red. It was apparently his turn to speak but he forgot his words again. After another moment alone with the singer and some incoherent shouting from behind the trees, the unsuccessful mummer managed to address his siblings, cutting every word out harshly, like a war catapult spitting stones in close succession.

"I have no fear, brothers. Our sister will do her duty for she will never love. There is too much wolf blood in her for any tender feelings to take root. She is as cold as the ancient walls of Winterfell!"

"Who said my feelings were tender?" Sansa read out loud, terrifying and wonderful like the snow, just like the sensation of winter in Sandor's veins was in the dark. Staring towards where he was seated, she continued in a voice he had never heard her use, deeper and dreamy, "When I fall in love, it will be like a winter storm that sweeps away everything on its path. Until then, I will just be myself."

Mance waved his arms in many directions imitating the movement of the wind. All monks started blowing the air from their lungs at Sansa, imitating the tempest, laughing at her as she laughed back, a bird freed from her cage, until they all exited the stage chasing each other, ending the scene for that day.

Sandor's inside constricted. Sansa's act stirred the cravings best left forgotten when one lived as a brother of the Faith. The thought that Sansa's love could be like a storm stayed with him for hours nonetheless, until he fell in fitful sleep.

They slept until it was time for the afternoon meal, determined as they became to travel all night, to stay well ahead of any enemy who might still be on their trail. Mance said there was to be no more camping in the open during darkness, only behind the walls where there was fire. No one questioned his leadership. Even Baelish had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

 _For the time being,_  Sandor thought, knowledgeable. _The whoreson is bound to try something again. I'd better keep my sword sharp._

They had to keep going and if they did so, on the next day they might get a chance to reach Raventree Hall, the castle of the Blackwoods, known for its high walls, and to find shelter there for a night or two, before continuing south.


	6. Of a Hair Dye and One Too Many Ravens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the ravens start following the mummers, and there is kissing

**Elder Brother**

A host of men and a large travelling wagon came to the gates of the Raventree Hall late in the afternoon. The first autumn snow was already melting in small ponds of murky brown water, scattered among the patches of the whiteness still untouched.

The men looked as haggard as their horses but there was determination in their eyes. Some were still armoured and some wore the brown robes of the Faith. Some traded their belongings between them so that a brown cloak could be seen hovering over the metal of a knight's armour, and many a monk wore a piece of steelwork here and there; a single vambrace or an elaborate helm.

"Lord Baelish, if you please," said the Elder Brother towards the wagon, finding his courtesy with utmost difficulty. "You are the overlord of these people. Ask them to allow us to come in." He rubbed his hurting head under the cowl and chewed one of the last carefully rationed pieces of the root called the wolf's grass. The weed grew in abundance everywhere in the riverlands but it became scarce with the end of summer. It had healing properties to keep the skin clean and smooth.

The Elder Brother used it every day, because the Elder Brother before him insisted he should do it at least until winter came, in order to fully heal his naked scalp, injured beyond recognition in the battle of the Trident. The treatment had left him conveniently bald ever since, so that he didn't have to shave his head as the servants of the Seven were inclined to do.

_Most of them._

Sandor Clegane to his right side had always been an exception. He kept his long, lank black mane with no grey hairs visible, despite approaching his thirtieth name day, a respectable age for a soldier in Westeros. Most of men-at-arms could count themselves fortunate if they lived to see twenty name days in times as confused as their time had become. Then again, Sandor never took any vows of the Faith, _or any vows at all_ , the Elder Brother remembered, so he was free to do as he pleased.

 _I suppose I may have to get used to it that the skin on my head will hurt from now on,_ the monk pondered his future with curiosity, enjoying the bitter, familiar taste of the root.

"Might be his lordship would prefer a company of wild beasts for the night. It could cost him his other arm. Or his little finger," Sandor Clegane commented with indifference, idly spurring Driftwood forward.

 _The Stranger will take me before I call that horse Stranger,_ concluded the Elder Brother, on the matter of the blasphemy the animal's real name represented, as they crossed over the moat and entered into the castle.

Lord Baelish was fortunately convinced by the younger Clegane's parley abilities and addressed Lord Blackwood as his liege lord. The Elder Brother thanked the Seven that rudeness sometimes opened the doors that the courtesy alone would have kept shut.

The travellers were given rooms on the ground level of the wooden keep inside the castle, overlooking the largest weirwood tree that the Elder Brother had ever seen in his life, still white; with branches entangled as in a work of the most gifted artisan at the king's court, when decorating the walls of a new palace for a new queen.

The tree was beautiful in its desolation despite having been dead for a thousand years, if one was to believe the legends of old. It had no leaves, only branches, missing on the red splendour of its northern brothers.

The monks and the lesser knights settled in, while Lord Baelish, his natural daughter and their squire were taken to the lord's solar on the upper floor for a meal. They were to sleep in rooms up there, as their rank demanded.

"This is it!" said Mance loudly. The Elder Brother had not seen him that joyful yet. "I didn't know the name of this place and by the will of the old gods we have been brought right to it! We just need to make the lovely lady come out after she shares bread and mead with the old lord. Then we can rehearse one of the truly important scenes in my show."

"There is a way, but you won't like it," answered the Elder Brother. "Send word to Lord Baelish that the knights will train in the yard before nightfall, because they couldn't do it earlier, and that his squire is welcome to join. If I know him, he will send the lady to watch over the lad. There are too many eyes in this castle, peasant and not only."

"Why is the lad important?" wondered the singer.

"I don't know, Mance," replied the monk, "but we both know that our lady is not who Baelish says she is. It makes you wonder about the boy."

"How do you know about her? And how do you know that I know?" asked the singer with sincere curiosity.

"You didn't ask Brother Gravedigger why it was important to rescue the girl when he exposed his plan to attack Lord Baelish yesterday. I have a hunch you agreed to it for more than just your play. My instincts about people rarely fail me. And how I know is a confession entrusted to my ears by a man on his dying bed. I will not betray him."

"Do you know her real name?" continued the singer. "For I don't. But I have met her brother, some time ago."

"Now that would surprise me greatly," observed the Elder Brother. "For all her brothers are dead. And if indeed you have known one of them, why don't you ask her to tell you her name?"

"Maybe I will. And you're right about the boy," said Mance with the perspicacity of a natural born leader. "The good knights walk on eggs around him for a reason."

"You, ser," Mance commanded one of the younger knights who had been listening to their conversation, and who seemed eager to enjoy the Northman's protection ever since the encounter with the dead in the woods. "You heard us. Go tell Baelish just that. Let us train if train we must!"

xxxxxxxx

The Elder Brother stood silently next to the Lady Sansa, pretending to watch the clash of swords in the yard before them, from behind the fence of an arched porch of the keep, which flanked the yard on one of its sides. She seemed to have eyes only for the dead weirwood, where black ravens came to nest, one after another, shrieking at moments with the taciturn and lengthy arrival of dusk.

"The red of the sunset is peculiar over here," she said. "It resembles blood, but the wonder before you makes you forget that it is so."

"Aye," he said, not knowing why she spoke to him all of a sudden.

"Brother Gravedigger," she continued after a while, "have you known him for long?"

"Long enough, I would say," he replied, sensing her intent to learn more about Clegane. "We found him dying in the woods and I healed him. He stayed with us doing useful work ever since. Also during Saltpans."

"Why are you mentioning Saltpans?" she asked, on her guard at once, very suspicious.

"For nothing. It was merely the worst calamity that hit the neighbouring lands since he has been with us," the Elder Brother hurried to dissipate her doubts. "He helped me cure the wounded and bury the dead in the end."

"Oh. I see. I am sorry for my reaction, brother. Indeed, the grievous tidings of the atrocities in Saltpans have also reached us in the Vale."

"And a tall blond lady knight reached us on the Quiet Isle. She was looking for her sister, a girl with auburn hair who might be almost eight and ten by now. Except that the girl she wanted to find was not her sister but the last living heir of an all but extinct great house from the North," the Elder Brother decided to embark upon a conversation he should have had much earlier. _A bit of confidence cannot harm any of us. Maybe in time we could help her. Maybe I could if she doesn't trust Clegane for it or if he never gathers the courage to try. The new High Septon has the highest regard for my labours in favour of the people of the Seven._

"Why should anyone be looking for such girl?" Sansa asked with indifference.

"To honour an oath given by someone else to the girl's mother before her untimely death. But that is not the matter."

"What is?" asked Sansa.

"I am a healer, my lady. I saw you washing your hair in the streams flowing into the Trident with the mixture of the herbs containing wolf's grass root. I can tell what it is by the smell. I use it to keep my head hairless, but I understand that in combination with other plants it can also change the colour of the hair. Please, believe me when I say that I mean you no harm, and forgive me for my impetuous reactions when I saw you so attached to your _father_ when we first met."

"I will meditate on your words," said Sansa when the training ended, and her eyes searched for the boy squire to take him back in. "I would take my leave now, please, it's getting late."

"Do not go yet, I beg you, my lady," pleaded the singer behind them. "Lord Blackwood still has your father occupied, from what his knights that now follow my lead could tell by spying on the solar. And the ravens will make a wonderful background for our next reading."

**Sansa**

Sansa stood in front of the dead weirwood tree, populated by several flocks of ravens roosting under the falling sun. More were seen flying towards the tree, from what had to be the north, if she could trust her letters for directions. She noticed that the parchment was pretty long this time, longer than any they had read beforehand, and her heart ran faster at the thought of what it might contain.

She saw the Hound approaching from the porch, his mask already on his face. For the first time he didn't wear his monk's cloak, nor the cowl, and she noticed how his hair was carefully combed to the side of his face where his burns were well hidden by the smooth white surface of the odd disguise the northern singer made them wear. _He must be faithful to a long lasting habit of arranging it so_ , she supposed.

She hadn't seen him from nearby since the direwolf nearly killed him, and that possibility alone had scared her a thousand times more than the dead men attacking them or the unknown terror they had seen coming from the plains.

It was for the best that none of Petyr's party recognised the direwolf for what it was. They took her explanation at face value. Everyone knew that shadowcats existed in the South and one of them murdered a being from old Nan's tales; a snark or a grumkin. The latter was Sansa's favourite expression for being more poetic.  _Nymeria did kill that creature,_ she thought. _That much is true._

 _Words have their use,_ she smiled inwardly. _Maybe they also are a woman's weapon,_ she thought remembering the teachings of the queen. _And Petyr's,_ she noted bitterly. _Sweet words are nothing but deceit._ Yet she was painfully curious to hear what words the singer used on this occasion to convey the legend of the unknown couple.

She even had time to think, or to hope, again, against all hope, that Arya was alive and not far, now that she knew beyond doubt that Nymeria was free and prowling the woods of the riverlands. Or maybe it was just the two of them, Sansa and Nymeria, the only surviving Starks, if Arya, like Lady, died before her time.

Her musings were cut short because the Hound stood only a step away from her, wearing only a pair of light and simple dark brown garments of a brother of the Faith. _He won't survive winter in those,_ she worried. She had to arch her neck a bit up to face him and then she noticed a tiny trickle of sweat on his neck, dripping from under the mask. _He trained with the others,_ she remembered. _And he did it hooded as he does everything now: the cloak is now his armour and his helm._

She felt unsafe with him so close, and unarmoured for a change. But instead of being afraid of him, or for him, she discovered that she was afraid of herself.

So she turned to the singer for guidance of what they should do.

"Ser," she said, "shall we stand or sit down?"

"You'll be standing for this one, I think," he replied. "You can also walk as you see fit. Let the words guide you in your movements."

Sandor Clegane spat a tiny bit of slime mingled with blood to the ground next to her, and she instinctively made a step backward, repulsed.

"Singer," he rasped immediately, startled by her gesture. "You should ask one of the knights to read with the lady. Someone more _gentle_ and well mannered."

"No," said Mance. "We've been through this before. You'll be fine. Unless the lady truly desires a change."

"No, I'm used to him by now," Sansa said without thinking, and she immediately tried to correct her being much too forward for a lady in this situation. "The mask fits him perfectly. All the other men are smaller, it will slide off their faces."

"The lady has a point," said Mance, his laugh getting lost amidst the insistent chatter of another flock of ravens that had just landed on the dead branches of the white tree. "Please, read. This scene is important."

"Why?" asked Sansa, forcing herself to purposefully make a step _closer_ to the Hound, even if he might spit again.

"You'll see, just do it," Mance urged them when the Blackwood's servants, scrawny and famished as their master, brought torches to illuminate the porch.

 _The siege they endured must have been truly awful,_ thought Sansa, remembering a talk during dinner in the Vale of how Lord Blackwood bowed his knee to King Tommen. She was pleased with the light and the warmth of fire while she was waiting for Sandor Clegane to speak.

It was his turn to start.

"So we meet again," he rasped after a long while as naturally as if the words were his own.

"I beg you a pardon, my lord, but so you say. I don't believe that we have ever been properly presented," she read back.

"We have never been _properly_ presented, that much is true," he almost growled. "But we have met. And I want to tell you that I, at least, have never forgotten our meetings even if you did."

"My lord," Sansa asked with shyness she didn't need to fake, thinking how the words read so far could apply to the two of them just as well. She wished to tell him she had never forgotten the Hound, but the singer would be angry if she didn't go on reading the good lines. "The darkness is covering your face. In honesty, I don't know who you are. The old gods have called for me to come out and witness what once was their home. They speak with the voices of the ravens, didn't you know?"

"I have no patience for the trees, my lady," he read in a steadfast voice. "Born and named as I was in the light of the Seven."

"The old gods speak to all men and it is wise to heed their call. It seems they called you out as well. Why else would you be standing here looking at the dead tree if you don't even share our faith?"

"Or elsewise we could say that they called you out to meet me. Again. For which I would be glad."

"Your armour must be black and encrusted with red rubies, but I do not discern your sigil and I still cannot see your face. If you have honour, come and show yourself in the moonlight! Or are you afraid that the ravens will peck your eyes?"

"If I step forward, you would run your lance through me, my lady. And I still value my life, unworthy as it may be."

"Why would I do that?" Sansa asked, puzzled. _Who is the lady I am playing?_  She obviously knew how to handle weapons because a lance was mentioned already for the second time. What the Hound said next made her forget all her curiosity towards the play, and she found that she could barely stand straight on her two feet, too light of weight as a flake of new snow.

"Because if I come any closer, I will kiss you in the sight of the old gods and all their ravens, and a wolf-maid like you will not take that offence lightly. I have no right to you under the sun of the Seven and you would hate me if I revealed my face. Yet I would kiss you now, though it would mean my certain death," the Hound's cruel voice ebbed in a whisper towards the end.

 _But you did kiss me,_ Sansa thought, pressing the parchment closer to her chest to hide the trembling of her hands. _Do you sometimes remember that as well? Or is it only stupid girls just flowered who remember a single kiss of a man grown?_

"I dare you do that, if you are brave," she read not believing what she was reading, her cheeks getting very warm from under the mask. _The singer surely doesn't mean us to do this! He told Petyr that his play was chaste. "_ I will close my eyes and no harm will come to you. And I will let you leave not knowing who you are."

"And why would you allow _me_ to do _that,_ my lady?" asked a deep voice, self-assured, mocking.

"I am a daughter of one of the great houses of Westeros," she started in a frail voice, but the words of the unknown woman gave her strength and she continued bravely. "The second greatest one if I am to believe what our maester and my septa had been teaching me. And I would like to know, before I wed and do my duty to my husband, upholding the honour of my house, how it is to be kissed by someone who does not only want me for my claim."

 _And who wouldn't call me by my mother's name,_ she added for herself remembering Petyr's last unfatherly kiss in the Vale.

"My lady, that knowledge may not come lightly," he said, sounding uncertain.

"No knowledge ever does," she said, closing her eyes, because it occurred to her it was a proper thing to do.

They both wore masks so his lips could barely touch hers. Still she felt their warmth and that one corner that was different than the other. _A ruin,_ she knew. Her eyes shut, she reached out with her arms, standing on her toes, and wrapped them around his neck like laces in a bodice tied so tight you could hardly breathe. A pair of strong arms jealously gripped her waist, lifting her slightly off the ground. He ended their kiss too soon and just leaned his masked forehead to hers.

And then all the ravens cried and started flight, their inhuman voices croaking tireless in the air. As black rain they were, in the darkening skies, and Sansa thought she could hear a single word repeated over and over again. The onlookers whistled softly, and clapped, and the ravens kept crying, "The King! The King! The King!"

Sansa's feet touched the soil again and she heard Sandor pacing away when she remembered to look for her parchment and read the next words.

"Thank you, my lord, for an honest kiss," she read and halted, only so slightly. "I would change our bargain and look upon your face now, and finally know who you are, to tell my children, and my children's children, about a young man who broke my heart."

"I thought you didn't know me," he said, caught by surprise.

"Young maidens can lie too, didn't you know? It was you in the woods of Winterfell, and you again on the battlements of Queensgate. If I didn't know better, I would say that you were following me."

"And if I were?" asked Sandor Clegane.

"I would tell you that tomorrow I shall depart with my father and my brothers to Harrenhal, for the great tourney of Lord Whent."

"My father bids me to go there as well."

"Will you ride in the tournament? My betrothed will take part in the melée."

He was silent, so she continued, "I beg you a pardon, my lord. You may not even be a knight. It is no matter."

"I would ride to seven hells if you asked it of me," he answered in all seriousness.

"I'm not asking you that. All I ask is another kiss," she read, not believing she succeeded to say the words in cold blood.

 _Maybe I have the wolf-blood in me after all,_ she thought and he was with her, and around her, and she opened her eyes when his uneven lips touched hers again. His eyes were closed then and it made it easier for her. So she kissed him back that time, as much as the mask allowed, not knowing how it was done, but doing it anyway.

The ravens kept calling for their king. The only other sound to be heard was the flapping of their wings, with the viewers too deep immersed in the scene unfolding to make any noise. It appeared to be as real as if Jenny of Oldstones and her Prince of Dragonflies had descended among them.

"You taste like a blood orange from Dorne, my lord," she read her final words when they separated. "It is a taste of the south, a simple sustenance for the Dornish, but a mortal peril for the children of the North. I have tried it now of my own choosing and I fear that I will never be the same."

**Elder Brother**

The cheers went on and on, wanting the mummers to play some more. Only the Elder Brother did not take part in the merriment. He was too late for the scene because the Lady Sansa asked him to accompany the squire upstairs. And he had to fight off a dozen ravens who thought he was just another gnarled, dead weirwood branch to rest upon.

"Begone you birds," he told them, "this land has no true king and all that is left is the suffering of its people."

"Mance," he called out for the singer, "maybe the ravens in your story should call out for the prince that was promised. Or another unlikely saviour from the songs. Anyone who could give us hope to survive this winter."

But no one listened to the blabbering of an old insipid monk because the mummers stopped playing and the lady could not cross from the tree to the porch without stumbling through the muddy waters of the melting snow.

So her would-be knight offered her his arm and they crossed the short distance together, through the crowd encouraging them and approving of them. _They know this to be a mummer's show yet they love them all the same,_ thought the Elder Brother as he went searching for a good place to sleep. _As far as possible from the seven times cursed ravens._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading )))


	7. A Mantle of Crystal Blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the demons of winter strike hard at night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for Baelish talking to Sansa – because in canon it always gave me emotional creeps even when he didn't kiss her.

**Alayne/Sansa**

"You think they love you, sweetling," said Littlefinger, "because they clapped to you, repeating silly words to a man you've never met."

 _But I have met him, father,_ thought Alayne, trying hard to forget that her name was Sansa, Sansa Stark. It was the only way she was going to endure an endless night in Petyr's company.

"For all you know, he may be a murderer and a thief who took refuge with the Seven. I reckon that it doesn't take any courage to butcher a few dead men when what you've been doing every day is digging graves. And those in the mob watching the play only want to flop you on your back, have their way with you, and then sell you to Cersei if she survives the trial. And knowing her she might."

 _Do you want to flop me on my back too?_ thought Sansa with growing certainty that Petyr could also deliver her to the Queen Cersei in King's Landing if his other plans failed.

"Remember what happened to Lord Eddard Stark. All hailed him when he became the Hand of the King and then they all cheered even louder when the king asked for his head."

Sansa bit her lip not to remember. She wanted to blink away her tears, but they still ran down her face in silence.

"And I, I will make you the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Never forget that. For the love that I bore your late mother"

A loud sob escaped from Sansa's throat, and Petyr's lips thinned in twisted amusement.

"What is it, Alayne? Oh, I forget what a gentle soul you are," he said in a worried voice, cupping her face with his hand. She felt the sickening smell of mint too close to her cheeks sticky from crying.

A gruff voice of a fat peasant interrupted the silence, and Sansa was grateful. He was a leader, of sorts, in the Pennytree village holdfast, turned into a war shelter for all of its people.

"Isn't she your daughter m'lord?" said the sturdy man. "Them brothers out there told us. Asked us to keep'n eye on her 'n' all."

"Seven heavens, we were just talking."

"So talk you to a wench, m'lord, not a daughter, with them hands," added the man, sticking his nose almost between them. Then, he remained standing there as if he had nothing better to do until, Petyr finally released her.

When Littlefinger and Sansa were alone again, she tried to voice her thoughts, meekly: "Father, you said no one did anything for love."

"Aegon VI Targaryen will do all we want him to do for your love when he takes King's Landing and finds a key to the North waiting for him on a silver platter. Or better said served by me on his platter, with a direwolf on her maiden cloak. I will not let Varys win this game because he must have helped protect Rhaegar's heir from being killed by the Mountain. It will take Aegon at least two weeks from Storm's End to the capital, and I hear that the old griffin, Jon Conington, is with him. That one will surely heed to my wiser words because he's a hopeless fool in the game of thrones. We have to make haste to join them."

"You taught me that the game is very simple," said Sansa. "In it you live or you die. If this... if Lord Conington is still alive, maybe he is not such a fool."

"That could be," said Baelish, quietly considering her words.

"And you, sweet thing," he continued with his eyes full of visions of great things to come, "if you want to live, you will do exactly as I say. I hear that the boy, Aegon, was trained by a septa so it shouldn't be too difficult for you. Perchance it pleases you to read the same songs. He might make stitches for all I care, for as long as he marries you, once he is proclaimed king."

"Somehow I doubt if, father. He is a _Targaryen_. Their words are fire and blood. His grandfather was the Mad King. His father kidnapped a maid and raped her, starting a war!"

"There have been dragons with a kind heart. Aegon is one of them. Like you, Sansa, are a harmless little wolf," Petyr replied forgetting that she had to be Alayne.

"Who's Sansa, m'lord?" asked the overlord of peasants, from the gates of the holdfast, leading back in a group of people, battered and bloodied, but still alive, at that very moment.

"No one," Sansa said in one voice with Littlefinger, thinking how there wasn't much difference between having to marry Harold Hardying or Aegon VI Targaryen, or anyone else for that matter. _Their lips would not be cruel, nor uneven behind the mask. They would be wormy, like Joffrey's,_ she was certain. She arched her neck towards the gates to look at the group that came in, but she could not see the Hound, the Elder Brother, or the singer.

She couldn't help but wonder at how Petyr's appetites had been growing day by day since he first took her from the capital. Next thing he was going to plan to proclaim himself the King of the Seven Kingdoms. _Petyr Baelish, First of His Name_.

Her imprisonment in the Vale abruptly came to an end when Petyr received reliable tidings that a new Targaryen pretender was marching on King's Landing, with the Golden Company in tow, the signs of the Blackfyre rebellion high on their banners, only to better hide a fact that they were harbouring Rhaegar's only son and heir. So Littlefinger hurried south to occupy his rightful position, a master of coin to any king, loyal to none but himself.

For the time being, Petyr was still the Lord Paramount of the Trident, at least in name, and Sansa remembered how his vast lands dawned covered with a thick white cloak of snow when they had woken up that morning and started to ride.

She stopped listening to Petyr who kept on talking, and she prayed for all her companions outside, the good and the evil, to last the night. Somehow she felt much safer on the road where they could get killed at any moment, than she had ever felt in the past years since her father's death . At least, on the road, she could die, but so could the others. _Anyone can die._ For some reason, that thought calmed her down and gave her force to wait for the outcome of the battle.

**Sandor**

Instead of heading immediately south when they left Raventree, they followed the Widow's Wash east because that was where the army went, under the leadership of Ser Jaime Lannister, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. Or so Lord Blackwood told them. He rode with them, saying that his old bones could use the warmth of the end of the summer in King's Landing if they ever reached it on time. On time meant before the Long Night, which everybody agreed was coming and Sandor was searching his mind for the scarce teachings he received in the West on the matters of winter and the dangers it brought.

When they arrived to Pennytree, the night was falling. The buggering peasants were closed in a holdfast made of hard stone and they wouldn't let anyone in or out. He was in a mood to run his sword through all of them, one by one, or maybe in pairs.

The village was full of corpses of men and their horses. They lay everywhere from the stony keep to the oak-tree covered with pennies which gave the place its name. Half of the army led by the Kingslayer must have died there, defeated by a larger enemy host.

The Hound walked next to Mance who turned the bodies with his feet. The lines of worry were etched deeper and deeper in his forehead.

"It smells of snow again, brother, and we have no time to burn them all," he said to the burned monk playing Rhaegar. "It'll snow again tonight and they will come to life. And where so many wights are, the walkers are never far behind."

"Horseshit," snorted the Hound. "The white walkers have not been seen for ten thousand years."

"Not here. But in the north they awoke from their sleep already in the time of my youth. That is when your black crows started deserting the Night's Watch. They saw what was out there, and for many not even the threat of beheading would keep them on the Wall. The Long Night is coming! Could be some of them walkers have followed me south. It is said that they cannot find a path by themselves."

"Say that you're right, and I don't say that you are, what are you fighting the snarks with?"

"Fire and the light of the sun scares them away, for now," said Mance, staring at the Hound, "and dragonglass, a black stone you call obsidian south of the Wall, is said to be mortal to them. It's very rare in our days. Valyrian steel may also kill them but the only such sword in my land has not yet been measured against them."

"Where is your land?" asked the Hound.

"Where's yours?" Mance parried his query. "Come, brother, we have to force the peasants to give us shelter behind those walls. Soon there will be too many wights swarming around for us to fight off."

Two hours later it was pitch dark and Sandor was still outside, barricaded with Mance, Elder Brother, Blackwood, and all the surviving knights and monks, in the largest and most solid house in the village, waiting. They could not start the fire around the place where they would make their stand as Mance wanted because there was no dry wood and the bloody peasants wouldn't give them any. At least they had sense to let in the little bird, the squire, and unfortunately also Baelish because they pitied him for the loss of an arm. The Elder Brother managed to convince the bastard in charge, a fat man red of face, to keep an eye on the lady and that had to be enough.

The vigil was long and Sandor had time to think, just what he was trying to avoid since he escorted the little bird to her room the night before. She peeped her good night and he was left like a pup out of its kennel, unsure about what had just happened between them or if anything had happened at all.

 _She's believing her songs, that's what happened,_ Sandor thought. _She would kiss anyone because a buggering bard imagined it so, with her head full of great ladies and brave knights that have no place in a world run by killers and whores._

 _Why did you do it first, then?_ He did not know. _Why not have what others already took?_ he told himself remembering she was wedded and bedded long time ago. Then again, whores kissed differently and if he didn't know any better he would say that she had never kissed a man of her own volition. _Maybe the Imp would skip that part,_ he thought, amused and equal part ashamed of his thoughts.

The attack came upon them swift and brutal.

A dead horse broke in through a window, killing a knight and brother Norbert in one stroke. The Hound jumped aside and helped cut it into pieces. More wights came at every opening and they did a good job cutting them down. Someone else died screaming behind him and the Hound was grateful for having no armour as it would only slow him down. It was the same like fighting Gregor, his _brother,_ the Mountain. The Hound knew his considerable strength was not enough because those creatures were probably all stronger than him and he had to rely on speed and well calculated strokes. One had to admit, in a second between killing two corpses over and over again, that the singer held his ground admirably as well.

The creatures of winter held monks in great esteem, they were hunting them before the others. Several knights managed to hide in the dark corners of the house under the furniture and remain relatively unmolested. Sandor understood he was one of the main targets and he enjoyed it. His blood was up since the last reading of the stupid show. _It's better to play at swords than to think of what will never be mine, not willingly. And I wouldn't want to have it any other way._

An infernal dead horse ridden by the corpse of Ser Ilyn Payne broke into their shelter and swept the Elder Brother with him. Before he knew it, Sandor ran outside, panting, not heeding the singer's cries to stay in: going out meant certain death. For a moment he didn't see a thing, it was too dark. He blinked a few times and looked for a trail. The horse from seven hells and its rider dragged the Elder Brother out of the village and Sandor followed closely behind. In the woods he soon lost all trace of the late king's justice and his steed.

 _You're not his sworn shield_ , he told himself. _You don't have to do this._ But the Elder Brother nursed him to health where no one else would and Sandor kept searching for him in the darkness.

He stumbled forward looking for any sign of movement when it began to snow again. The woods shone with the eerie moonlight, and even the Hound would have been glad for a sight of fire in a distance rather than the white wasteland until the eye could see. _Those wolves would come handy now,_ he thought, _they knew for certain how to handle a grumkin._

The thing attacked him faster than lightning. All he could do was avoid it and all his speed was nearly not enough. It tried to pull the limbs out of his body but Sandor ducked and stayed in one piece for a time. His greatsword made no effect at the creature whatsoever, he could have caressed it instead and it would've been the same. Deadly grip got his bad leg and he thought he would meet his end.

" _Dragonglass, a black stone, obsidian as you call it south of the wall, is said to be mortal to them,"_ he remembered and in a sudden stroke of brightness he wrenched open the pouch with his honing stone, reaching for the black one he had found on the ground where the first grumkin they'd seen had been defeated. He whirled it towards the middle of the creature pulling his leg backward and was rewarded with a blessed relief. His leg went limp and free and the air around him became saturated by irregular blue crystals, drawing changeable patterns in the marvel of freshly frozen ice.

 _This is how the Lannister army must have felt in the Whispering Wood,_ he thought remembering the first great victory of the Young Wolf. _The North is upon as and we are not prepared to face it._

Only then he noticed the Elder Brother sprawled on the ground under the eaves of the forest. _Time for me to save you from dying under a tree, brother,_ he thought.

The Hound bent over his friend to check if he was breathing when he felt a cold hand tear a chunk of flesh from his left shoulder as if he had been a wild boar the creature wanted for dinner. He cried out in pain. The sound made the Elder Brother's narrow dark eyes shoot open and Sandor saw a hiltless dagger that had been on Baelish's throat plunge into the darkness behind him. Then his body betrayed him, red blood oozed from his shoulder, and he sensed the arrival of oblivion. He stared at the freezing air of the night, quietly covering his huge scarred body with a thin mantle of blue crystals, not from this world, or the next.

He laughed weakly before he passed out because his last conscious thought was for how much he had wanted to kiss Sansa Stark the night of the battle on the Blackwater Bay, when he ran to her rooms to hide, offered to save her on an impulse and then threatened to kill her instead. And she sang him a song and cupped his burns with her hand. He wouldn't have done anything else, just kissed her, as the knights from the stories were wont to do with their ladies. His desire to do so had been so strong that he could almost remember a kiss he had never given. So he left to die somewhere else before he could taint her innocence.

xxxxxx

"Will he live?" a gentle voice asked from far away.

"He will, my lady, it will just take some time," was a humble response of his brother, the elder one.

The Hound blinked, but she was gone and he faced the rough features of the singer next to a familiar monk's cowl.

"Stranger take me" he cursed, recalling something important, "show me that dagger of yours, brother."

A hiltless weapon was put in his left arm, weak from the loss of blood. He turned it towards the only source of light in a dank dark room, a high window which let in a few rays of shy morning sun through the thick iron bars. The weapon revealed dark green and purple ripples in steel where the light shone through the blade.

"You, singer," he spoke with difficulty. "You can place Valyrian steel on your list of weapons that do work against snarks. And you, Elder Brother, you were one big stealing and not only whoring bastard before the Faith addled your brains. There is no other way a simple soldier of House Tarly would have had his hands on such a dagger. There's only a dozen Valyrian blades left in Westeros. Not even the old lion of Lannister was able to buy one for the Kingslayer with all the gold of Casterly Rock."

"I was a hedge knight," said the Elder Brother, "but you're probably right. I'm sorry that I don't remember where I exactly stole it to give Mance an idea for his next scene."

"I'll live this time, right?" the Hound asked and he saw that he would in the eyes of the two men. _Since when are people fussing over me as if I were Lolys Stokeworth,_ he thought and then realized he had heard the word _scene._

And Sandor Clegane understood he was going to continue reading his role in the bloody play for as long as he lived, because if the singer devised some more kissing, or any other such things, there was no way the Hound would allow anybody of their present company, or anyone at all, to read to his little bird with his life and body intact.

**Mance**

Jon's sister and the Elder Brother were about to read the next scene. It was a bit later in the morning and they were still in the Pennytree holdfast, in a ground floor room where the Brother Gravedigger slept, injured, his left shoulder covered with bandages and freshly smelling leaves.

The snow was melting immediately with the arrival of the sun, and plants could be found under it, which was all good for it meant that the Long Night was not quite there yet. Only a handful of monks, not more than twenty knights, Corbray and Blackwood survived the night's battle. Mance was grim and wondered about who could replace brother Norbert in the role of Brandon Stark, but no one came into mind.

 _It's a long way to King's Landing,_ he thought. _We're bound to meet more people._

**Sansa**

"Shall we start?" Sansa asked of the Elder Brother.

"Aye," he said.

"What did father tell you?" she asked.

"He said you were walking on the battlements at night, more than usually. And in Raventree your septa saw you flushed late in the evening. You told her you went training but no one trained that night."

"And?" Sansa asked as impatiently as she felt, glancing sideways at the Hound, pleading silently that he would wake up. The reassurances of others that he was going to be fine were simply not enough. The image of Robert Baratheon killed by a boar would not leave her mind. And whatever attacked Sandor Clegane, had been even stronger.

"They think you took a lover," read the Elder Brother, and she had to react. "Me, little brother? I'm not like our older brother!"

"I know", the Elder Brother retorted, tiredly.

"Splendid," interrupted Mance. "You should keep that exhausted voice for when we go on stage. It will go well with the second son."

"I know that you're not him," the man of the Faith said seriously, looking at Sansa. "And I'm not him either. If I was betrothed to a woman as beautiful as he had the honour to receive, I would never look upon another; I swear it by the old gods for all time that has yet to come."

"So I would disgust you if I took a single lover, yet you condone that our brother took as many mistresses as he desired?" Sansa continued, admiring the boldness of the unknown woman's words. "Some of them from the noble houses, if we are to believe the stories."

"Sister, you could never disgust me. I am but worried for you. For I know how stubborn you can be when something comes close to your heart."

"As stubborn as you, little brother," she said, finishing a short scene they were rehearsing, before moving further east and then south.

The smell of burning flesh came in through the window. The villagers piled all the corpses and carcasses to a giant pyre in front of the house where the men had made their fortress the night before. Sansa could not see it, but on top of the pyre lay the lifeless body of Ser Ilyn Payne. The count of the dead was high but it could have been higher if the Warrior did not guide the hands of the two servants of the Faith to defeat the monsters leading the corpses, or so the smallfolk whispered.

Sansa looked for a handkerchief to protect her nose from the odour, when a grieving sound made its way from the bed. The Hound tossed and turned between the blankets as if he were laid down to rest in fire, and not on the softest cottons the peasants could provide her with, when she asked. _To please the lady,_ their fat leader had said.

"No, brother," the Hound pleaded, quietly. "Please, no."

She walked to him and took his hand.

**Mance**

Mance wondered why the lady did _that_. It was the first time he saw his Lyanna showing unhidden interest for the fellow playing Rhaegar outside of their readings.

"He has high fever," she said.

"It is no matter, my lady," the Elder Brother reassured her. "It will not burn him. I will go out and make sure that there is place on the wagon for him. We have to go. If we find the second part of the host of Ser Jaime Lannister still alive, they might protect us tonight."

Sansa mutely nodded and kept holding a large hand. Mance wanted to leave as well when a deep growl came from the lungs of the burned monk. It was obvious he spoke in fever, unaware of what he was saying.

"Sansa," he called. "Don't leave me."

"Is your name Sansa, my lady?" Mance dared asking.

"Sansa!" a low voice did not hesitate to admit defeat. "I love you with all my heart..."

Blue eyes looked at the King-beyond-the-Wall so hard they would have stabbed him if they could. Mance could not tell if she was upset because he heard her real name or for overhearing the maundering of the ugly monk, which could have cast a shadow on her honour if his ramblings were known.

He felt the pressure of the Valyrian steel on his naked throat before she replied.

"Yes. And don't tell anyone what you have just heard, not even to the Brother Gravedigger when he wakes up."

"Or what, _you_ will kill me?" he snorted, admiring Jon's sister, _Sansa._ _It is a good name,_ he concluded, _proud and beautiful._

She threw away the dagger the Elder Brother had forgotten and her big blue eyes swelled with tears. "Pardon me, my lord, I have not slept. I am not myself. And if Brother Gravedigger hears this, he would stop reading with us. It is not fitting for a man belonging to the Seven. And he may not mean it when he has all his wits back."

"I am no lord," said Mance, not understanding why that reply made Sansa burst into unstoppable tears, and bury her face in her shaking hands.

So he held her while she cried, as a true father, or an older brother would, and told her the truth.

"I swear a vow on my friendship and loyalty to your brother, Jon Snow, by the grace of the old gods still the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, to whom I owe my life, that I will keep both your secret and his," he finished, pointing at the sleeping Rhaegar, wondering what his real name was.

 _I will find out some day,_ Mance thought later, when he finally stepped out in the bright sunshine of the new day, and readied himself to ride further south, one step closer to fulfilling his sending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note on age in SanSan, written initially as a comment to a reviewer on FF net but now also included here as my viewpoint on this issue: ASOIAF starts when she is 11 and he is 14 or 15 years older (counted by the fact he was 12 when Tywin sacked King's Landing, when he killed his first man, and Sansa was born approximately two years after that, assuming Catelyn is pregnant with Robb at the time of the sack). To say that Sansa should be nearing 18, while Sandor is nearing his thirties is simply an author's statement, left in a story, without denying the fact that there is an age difference between them, that even if people seem to age and mature faster in canonic Westeros, (since their POVs seem way more emotionally developed than the age of 11 already from the beginning of the story) I don't want to have, in a gimmick of mine, written for fun while we wait for the canon to continue, anything indicating that I actually approve of children having relationships because I just don't.


	8. The Noble Art of Stitching

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where needlework is an important art

**Sansa**

"Hello, Driftwood," Sansa said bluntly as there was no proper way to address a horse.

The big black beast stomped restless under a large nearly leafless oak tree and would not join the company of men and animals ready to depart. A few families of peasants decided to join them with their livestock. The singer cursed them by the old gods, until the Elder Brother pointed out peacefully that cattle could be eaten in case of dire need.

 _Not a singer,_ Sansa reminded herself, _Mance, Jon's friend.  Would that I could believe what he said. For maybe he is Jon's friend as much as Marillion was a friend of aunt Lysa and then wanted to rape me._

It didn't please her to remember how Marillion died later on for a crime he didn't commit because she, Sansa, repeated the lies Petyr taught her, so she spoke louder, "Driftwood, we have to go. Your master will have need of you when he wakes up."

The horse didn't move, it just neighed aggressively towards her. She regretted convincing the singer she could ride well, just to avoid any further conversation about Jon and her family.

"His name is Stranger," whispered the boy behind her, startling her.

"Sweetrobin, what are you saying?"

"The big monk called him Stranger. I heard him argue with the Elder Brother about that name."

"It is not proper to listen to the conversations of others," Sansa said in a tone of an elderly septa, grateful that young Robert Arryn brought the blind dog from the wagon. _He helped me talk to Nymeria,_ she thought. _At least I think he did._ M _aybe he could help with... Stranger._

It was a fitting name for the Hound's companion. A man who believed in killing must have felt at ease in the company of the god of death.

There were no hymns to sing to the Stranger. The only appropriate offer when lighting a candle was the utmost silence of the mind and heart, or so her mother explained her. So Sansa nuzzled the dog's head and gently pushed him to walk towards the strong black horse. She closed her eyes and willed complete silence in her mind, willed her heart to stop beating freely as it did so often since she left the Vale.

"Come, Robin," she said, taking the boy's hand.

As soon as they turned their backs on the horse to go back to the camp, the horse and the dog followed behind them, and Stranger approached Sansa. He looked as if he wanted something _from_ her. He almost bent slightly on one side.

"He will let you up," said Sweetrobin, in awe.

Sansa hated riding and the idea to ride the Hound's horse was terrifying in truth. She tried to steady herself remembering how that horse carried her to safety, when the mob caught her and pinned her to the ground in King's Landing. She bit her tongue and pulled herself up in a saddle.

It was bumpy but she had had worse with more tame animals in Winterfell.

Sweetrobin ran behind them, whistling and singing joyfully. It was lucky he stayed prudently away from the evil hooves of Sansa's new acquaintance.

Petyr ran toward her from the holdfast but he stopped dead when the horse snorted and readied his front leg for a strike.

"Alayne, sweet daughter, this is not a horse fit for a lady," he slurred with false concern.

 _Are you afraid to lose the influence you think to buy with my maidenhead or are you afraid to lose me?_ Sansa wanted to ask him, but she suddenly had a better idea.

"Of course not, father," she said with fear and colour in her cheeks. Petyr always made her so uncomfortable that her chirping, as the Hound would call it, would soon become the only thing she was capable of, whenever she was in his presence for long. "I thought you should ride it, because you now feel so much better and there's no place on the wagon any more with the wounded monk, Sweetrobin and myself."

"Alayne, I..." started Baelish...

"A splendid idea!" said the singer, intruding from behind. "Or do you want to be left in Pennytree? Last thing I heard was that your surviving knights turned to my command because your leadership was getting too many of them killed. Only your ugly red-haired sellsword remains loyal to your cause, but his fat friend had been murdered last night."

"I want to play Florian in your show," said Petyr, and Sansa's guts twisted. "I don't want unknown men to kiss my daughter, for as much as they serve the Faith."

"As you wanted to kiss her in the holdfast?" said Mance. "Like she was a common whore? Are you a Targaryen by birth, my lord, that you take close kin to wife? There, I didn't think you were. Or is she not your daughter?"

"Listen to me with great care!" the northerner went on. "There's only one role for you in my show if you want it. No, better, you have to play that role if you want _me_ to order the others to protect your pitiful life, Lord Protector, until we reach King's Landing and part our ways for good."

"An evil king?" inquired Petyr dramatically.

"No," said Mance. "You're too smart for that. I could use you as a prompter."

"Prompter? You mean the ugly little man hidden in a house under the stage in the middle reminding the players of what they should say?" Baelish asked in disbelief.

"Yes," was the only reply he got.

"Never!" said Petyr.

"It's that or nothing," the voice of the King-beyond-the-Wall sounded threatening and Petyr looked outnumbered. _For a while,_ thought Sansa. _Petyr will always find a way to turn the things around._ She got off Stranger and offered his reins to Petyr with as much humbleness as she could muster.

The former master of coin needed the help of two unharmed knights to get on the infernal horse, which puffed happily towards Sansa before it trotted to the beginning of the caravan, carrying Baelish away. The dog came back to Sansa and she felt as if the horse had just told her to get on the buggering wagon and see to it that his master lived while _he_ was going to keep the nasty old man entertained and away from her.

Smiling, she took the dog in her arms and overheard the Elder Brother talking to the singer at the gates.

**Mance**

"It was a talisman given to me by my second wife, I think," said the monk, scratching his apparently hurting head under the warm cowl. "Brother Gravedigger killed one creature of the cold with it. I lost it in the previous camping site and he must have found it."

"Heed my call, you good people of Pennytree," yelled Mance to all curious onlookers, waving with the tiny black stone in the air. "If anyone in your families has luck charms that look like this one, keep them close to you at night, and stab anyone who is not your spouse, your lover or your child. Stay in during darkness and keep your fires burning! Winter has come..."

Empty of feelings he returned the stone to the Elder Brother and said: "An obsidian talisman and a stolen dagger of Valyrian steel. What else are you hiding, brother? A high harp?"

The King-beyond-the-Wall laughed at his own jest and the Elder Brother just stated calmly: "There is something, Mance. The corpse riding the horse which took me. It sounds unseemly but I felt it wanted to protect me. Not harm me in any way. It felt almost as if he knew me when he'd been alive. But he couldn't do much when the snow began to fall because those other beings, they have a heart of ice. Nothing can stop their hatred for the creatures with warm blood."

"It is unheard of," said Mance after a while, "that a wight would care for a human, but then, so are many other things in our time. It's good that you shared this with me, brother."

**Sansa**

Sansa sat inside the wagon with Sweetrobin while the Hound was peacefully sleeping. The Elder Brother had removed his cowl for easier breathing, after four men had placed him inside, and made a sign of the Seven above his chest.

The Elder Brother now held the reins of four horses pulling the wagon in front. They were moving through a slowly changing land, becoming markedly different from the desert fields where the swamps of the Trident joined the mountain passes of the Vale. They went further south and further east, where no touch of winter could be seen as yet.

"He is very strong," Sweetrobin admired the sleeper, "he should be a knight and not a monk. He must have been very brave to survive those burns."

"He is who he is," said Sansa. "The War of the Five Kings had hurt many people. And you will be a knight one day too, if you keep practising with Ser Shadrich."

"You think so?"

"I know so," Sansa smiled. "Please, go and sit outside with the Elder Brother. He can teach you the names of the places we will be passing. A future Lord of the Vale has to know all he can about the Seven Kingdoms."

The boy took a deep breath, made and important face and crawled forward to the Elder Brother's coachman seat, full of fresh questions. The sickly lad was left in the Vale with the concoctions of Master Colemon, and Sansa was glad for that, even knowing that another seizure of the boy's illness was going to come upon them one day without the sweetsleep. At least until that happened it was easier to guide his steps; having left the Vale suited him as much as it did Sansa.

Sansa was left alone with Sandor Clegane, immobile, laying like a giant carved of stone. His fever abated, but not completely, and he didn't wake up yet since they talked to him after the night's raid. The space in the wagon was crumped so she sat next to him and put her hands on his chest.

 _His heart beats too fast for one asleep,_ she thought but he looked so much at ease she didn't 'have a slightest doubt that he had been sleeping.

"I don't know what to think of you," she told him. "I never did. Ever since you accidentally took me in your arms when I was scared of Ser Ilyn Payne on the kingsroad. I thought that you were my father then."

"But you were not," she continued. "In truth I don't know what you are to me."

She combed the hair away from his face with her fingers. It had a silky structure, unusual for a man who lived a harsh life. It was almost softer than her mother's, the smell and the feel of her mother now but a fading memory. A sob appeared on Sansa's lips but she swallowed it before it could come out. _Crying never helped me,_ she thought. _It is time to stop it._

He slept so that his scars were pressed in the rough cloth of the bedding, the good side of his face was turned towards her.

 _Maybe it is not comfortable that way,_ she thought.

With more strength than necessary she turned his head on the other side, so that his good cheek was on the cloth and she could look at the ruin of his face. She looked for a while and then she looked away. Through the open side of the wagon, she could see the land they were passing through, more fertile with every leap of the horses' hooves. The leaves were in rich yellow and autumn red, some crops could still be seen in the almost empty fields.

 _Maybe we will be safe here,_ she thought. _All of us._ But Sansa was now older and she knew better than to hope for that.

She looked at him again. His shoulders raised steadily in the rhythm of his breathing. She touched his good shoulder. It felt smouldering like the pyre that had just been put out in Pennytree. She leaned towards his face and touched his forehead with hers, as he did to her in the play. It was burning.

**Mance**

When they made a short break for the evening meal, before travelling all through the night as was their habit now, Sansa had to go out to make water, and Mance replaced her holding vigil, next to the sick man's bed.

"You don't have to pretend you're sleeping now," he said. "I can tell."

Clegane's grey eyes were immediately open and clear, with no trace or fever or haziness in them.

"You know, Brother Gravedigger," Mance said, amused. "I could teach you a few things other than songs if your faith allowed it. See, where I am from, you need to steal a woman."

"Bugger off, singer," the Hound thundered as a healthy man, rising from his bed and betraying further the ruse of being asleep.

"As you wish," the singer said and turned back once more to finish a loose thought before exiting the wagon. "Just think of what you can do, brother. You've just killed a white walker in cold blood. Few people ever did it, no matter the weapon at their disposal. And almost no one managed in their first encounter. Most of those who lived to tell about it, ran."

"Did you?"

"What?"

"Run."

"No," said Mance curtly and exited the wagon, where many voices started calling for him and for the Elder Brother in great distress.

**Sandor**

It had not been pretty at all.

If he didn't know that Oberyn Martell, the Red Viper, had killed his brother with a poisoned spear, and that his head was now adorning the palace of the Prince of Dorne (if one was to believe the ravens the Elder Brother had received from the High Septon on the Quiet Isle), Sandor Clegane would have sworn that they were facing another Gregor's doing. He and his pets had been the terror the riverlands, unleashed like wild dogs by the order of the old lion, Tywin Lannister, may he burn in seven hells.

The girl had died first and the boy was going to die next, but he stubbornly held on to his innards, visible through a deep gash in his stomach, trying to close the deadly wound with his bare hands, unwilling or unable to let go, despite being gagged and tied to a tree, his face caked with blood. The girl was hanging from a branch above him, a noose around her neck, long black hair tangled in the rope by the merciless autumn wind. With some luck her death had not been painful, but she had been hung or left hanging, it was hard to say, so that the boy could have a very good look at her.

Sandor moved to the coachman's seat when Mance stormed out to see what was going on. He mutely witnessed how the Elder Brother ran to the boy, followed by a little bird treading carefully behind, avoiding to step in dirt. The bloody boy _squire_ clung to Sandor as a frightened child and he had to shove him away. _I am a dog,_ he thought, _not a wet nurse._

 _"_ I let them go," the gutted boy was conscious and he could talk, worse, he couldn't stop talking, seeing death from close by. The Hound had seen it happen before to the wounded on the battlefield.

"I let them go and Jeyne just approved of what I did. She didn't even help. She just told them I was right to do what I did. She told it to the Lady Stoneheart too! And then our lady gave the order to the others. So my _brothers_ left me here to die as I deserved. Cut me a bit first to make sure I died, they did. Let her watch as I bled before they hanged her..."

"Save your breath, son" said the Elder Brother. "My lady," he continued, piercing Sansa with the darkness of his gaze, "his predicament requires a noble ability I have not been trained in. I've never forged a chain of a maester of a Citadel, where one of the rings stands for the skill of sewing the wounds. But I understand that the noble art of stitching is taught to every lady in Westeros and that you excel in it."

Sansa nodded silently despite that she could not look at the wounded boy who continued talking despite being told not to. The Hound had been pleased that, at least, he was not the only thing repulsive she could not stand to look at.

"I let them go so that my Lady Brienne would find them and never come back. But she didn't find them, she didn't... And she came back... She even brought him, the Kingslayer, as she gave her word!"

"Shut up," tried the singer, who finally joined the dying party, while all the others kept their distance.

"They're going to burn them in the caves tomorrow night!" the boy's voice could be heard all over the woods as if he were a battle commander leading the men, and not simply a lad too stubborn to die. "Hanging's not good enough for them, says our lady with her heart of stone..."

The Hound jumped of the seat, ignoring the searing pain in his shoulder and walked towards the atrocity they discovered.

"Lady Brienne and the Kingslayer, they'll burn them. Kingslayer's whore, they call her…" the boy still spoke when the singer gagged him again by force.

"Give me a shovel, " the Hound then said to the skinny monk who played the younger brother in the mummers' show. "There's no help for the girl and we don't want to leave her for the crows."

"We have to burn her," said Mance, stern like the stone Kings in the North in the crypts of Winterfell: the Hound had seen them once and mocked them, for no man alive could be as honourable as they were chiselled to appear.

 _"_ My lady," said the Elder Brother ignoring the proper burial discussion, "imagine you are working with white thread on a white and red surface. The red must remain hidden behind the white as a distant pattern of flowers, and the white surface has to be equally joined in all parts. Please! Would you try?"

The little bird was nervous behind the Elder Brother but she didn't make a single step back. _She has spine,_ thought the Hound. _Hidden, but unbending. Always had it._

Sansa walked back to the wagon and returned with her sewing gear.

"You have to open his mouth," said the Elder Brother to Mance, "we have to hear if he screams to know what to touch and what not to.

"I have an idea," said the bloody singer. "Boy, can you read?"

The boy nodded and Mance cleaned the blood from his face with fresh water from his drinking skin.

 _Does he sleep with parchments?_ thought the Hound when a large piece was unrolled in front of the boy's eyes, barring from him entirely the sight of his own wound. The Elder Brother made a small fire and heated the needle above it, holding it way too close to the fire for Sandor's liking.

"Boy, read," Mance said gently, but his words rang harsh. "If you ever met a wisp of a girl who turned over your heart, think of her and the words will come easier. And if you have to die, you will die with something good on your mind."

Sansa was now eyeing the wound, a needle and a thread ready in her elongated hand like a woman's weapon. The Elder Brother removed the boy's hands slightly to the side, pressing the wound together himself so that Sansa could see better the line that had to be sewn.

The boy swallowed and started reading, his voice still unnaturally powerful for the condition he was in.

"I've seen it all, the best taverns and the best whores, all that coin can buy. I had wenches and noble women silly enough to be enamoured of the lord's firstborn son. And why would I ever want to be a lord? Get married, have noble heirs, why? If I can just drink it and eat it all away!"

Enthralled, the Hound watched Sansa make one perfect stitch after another, tying the boy's guts back to their usual place, her fingers dipped in his blood. Her once rosy cheeks looked pale like snow, but her hands remained steady. She worked with calm precision, as if she were embroidering a lavish border of a handkerchief in the company of the queen.

 _Might well be it was more sickening to sew in Cersei's company and keep her face even,"_ thought Sandor, recalling their life in the Red Keep.

The boy kept reading from the parchment, his eyes becoming hazy, "Until a day came when they brought me my betrothed. I was told she was wild, unkempt, not worthy of a second look, she made water like a boy, held a sword, wielded the lance better than most men. I was determined to respect her only for the love I bore her brother, m _y brother_ in all but blood."

"Get away, you bloody idiots!" shouted Mance to chase away the gathering crowd of knighthood, peasantry and Faith. "This is not for you to watch, the boy may be dying!"

Blackwood and Corbray seemed to have settled their initial differences of two lesser lords fighting for precedence, because they worked together to send everyone else away. An encampment was being erected spontaneously at the order of no one in particular as men found other things to do then staring at the face of the misery of others.

Sandor felt a shovel being pushed in his hands, and he started digging, mindlessly. _It is not right to burn the girl,_ he thought.

The boy continued, his voice finally surrendered to weakness and loss of blood, coming out thin and unnatural. "Only an hour has passed since she's gone and I am lost, m'lords. She's all that I've been told, wild, and rude and stubborn. Yet she's so much more! She has courage, innocence, love! A rare flower, grown in the wilderness, that I wish to see in blossom for all the days of my life. And for the first time I bless the Seven that I was born a lord's firstborn son, for no lesser man could dream of winning the hand of lovely Lyanna, of the House Stark."

"Enough!" Mance tried to stop him, shooting a glance at Sansa. "This part has to be rewritten for the play, it still resembles too much my initial song."

But it was too late. The name Stark was spoken in the forest and would be repeated among men who were close enough to have heard it. The Hound noticed how Littlefinger immediately raised his head as a Dornish viper, from where he was resting on a pallet full of perfumed silks after a painful ride.

Sansa didn't flinch at the mention of her last name, her next stitch as straight as her previous one, the corners of her lips tight and determined, but the word Stark delved into recent memories of Sandor Clegane. He finally recognised the boy with eyes blue like steel for who he was, the lad following the little bird's sister. The Hound's frozen blood turned to boiling. Cold rage rose to unprecedented heights and he didn't feel his shoulder injury any more. He remembered the caves, the undead Beric Dondarrion and the trial of fire. They robbed him of his only earnings and treated him like a rabid dog. They did it in the name of king's justice for the smallfolk, which seemed to include of late hanging a young girl innkeep (judging by her dress), and gutting the lad stupid enough to be _knighted_ by the bastard Dondarrion.

And the girl probably did nothing wrong except fancying the _handsome_ boy, if Sandor's gut feeling was not wrong.

It rarely was.

The boy continued rambling because no one thought to gag him again, "Lem wore the helm, so they'll say to the smallfolk we're protecting and to Jeyne's little sister it was the Hound. And they'll never catch him because the Hound, he's dead. Buried on some isle, said the lady knight who will burn because of me... She will burn! Do you hear me? Burn..."

The boy's scream turned to a long wail when Sandor dropped the shovel and looked around for Stranger, who was not too far from Baelish to his surprise. He checked that his greatsword was over his back, not caring that the weapon was visible to others, not giving shit about his wound, keeping the presence of mind only so much not to show his infamous face to all from under the cowl.

"This Lem, where did he go?" he rasped. In his mind the black hair of the dead innkeep mixed with another dead girl's hair and the Hound became a boy again. _"It was an accident,"_ spoke an old maester from another time and Sandor Clegane covered his ears with his hands to shut up the voices in his head. Not losing another second, he rode out hard in the direction where the wounded boy looked instead of answering the question.

xxxxx

It was not hard at all. There were two of them and the archer rode forward. The Hound let him, his rage centred on the yellow-cloaked bastard, his wrath as destructive as Gregor's. He cut both legs of his victim under the knee as if they were made of wool and took off his snarling dog's helm from the man's head. Before he would slice Lem's head off he removed his cowl and made sure that the lying scum could see his face very well from the correct angle.

"This is, at least, something that the Hound did," he said and swung the sword without mercy.

It was too easy. Two years ago when he was a drunk wreck, it would have been more difficult. Peasants caught him then and almost put him to die in a cage for crows. The conclusion was simple. A goal he could not reach living as a sworn shield, he achieved when he didn't seek it any more, living as a hermit, digging graves. Even with his bad leg that he could still sometimes feel, he had become stronger than he'd ever been, as strong as Gregor, maybe more, it was hard to say. Yet he wouldn't have prevailed against the creature of the ice in the woods, more powerful than seven hells, not with force alone. _Perhaps I should have been afraid as the singer expected,_ he thought, in awe of the new enemy he now understood better.

He rode back to the camp, clutching his old helm close to his heart. His shoulder felt lifeless, as if it were made of cold wood, not flesh, and a few new bruises flowered here and there. He noticed they took down the girl and made a shallow grave instead of a pyre. The boy was nowhere to be seen. _So he must have made it,_ the Hound thought. _If I lay with my guts in the open, would you have patched me as well, Lady Stark?"_

The cold was making his body shake. He had to seek the covers in the wagon and sweat it out if he wanted to fight any more bastards in his life. And he just might want to. _For the dead girl and for myself. For all the dead children._ He was grateful that no one in the camp paid attention to him and his craven thoughts.

**Sansa**

The wounded boy was brought to rest under the open sky, next to the fire. Listening to the wolves howling in the distance finally made him stop talking of his own accord. To Sansa their voices sounded like a sign of the old gods that it would be safe to sleep that night.

"I know whom he will be playing," offered Sansa to Mance. "If he lives..." she added as an afterthought to the Elder Brother.

"Have faith, my lady," said the leader of the monks. "Your hands have not betrayed you. Wasn't this more important than sewing a sigil of a noble husband on a piece of fabric?"

Sansa moved a clean cloth soaked in previously boiled water over the wound to finish cleaning it, and felt a surge of pride. The stitch on the boy's stomach was straighter than if her septa had made it.

"You know his character in my play?" inquired the singer.

"Isn't it obvious?" she said coldly, feeling empty at the thought of the fat drunk king who had her wolf killed. _But I brought it upon myself by not telling the truth,_ she rectified. _Maybe Robert Baratheon would have been a different man if my Aunt Lyanna wasn't kidnapped. "_ Allow me to retire for the night, good sers. I could not get much sleep in the holdfast," she told them and left, not waiting for their permission.

A realization struck her while walking, and she nearly stumbled on the way back to the wagon. _I am playing my aunt! She had three brothers! And she met a man who was not her betrothed... A wolf girl and a dragon prince... How many were there in the history of Westeros? What happened? Does the singer know? Probably he doesn't and I am just a foolish girl who lives by the song..._

When Sansa returned to the wagon, it was pitch-dark on the outside and on the inside even more so.

Her head full of thoughts about the days long gone and people she had never met in life, Sansa staggered over her little cousin's feet. Sweetrobin moved almost to the middle of the wagon, tossing and turning in his sleep. He ended up carelessly spread on the floor, as if he dreamt of true knights ( _who may have been able to fly_ , Sansa thought) and maidens fair. Sansa caressed his forehead and moved him to his side, waiting until he relaxed again in his sleep, grateful he'd not had a fit of his illness, that time at least.

There was little enough place in the wagon when Petyr slept in it and she blushed when she realized who else was rolled in the blankets on the other side.

Sansa stretched out her bedding between her cousin and the Hound, and wished both that the he would speak about her in his fever again and that he would not, since Robin might hear it and repeat it to anyone willing to listen. She heard the wolves in the distance once more. Trying to discern Nymeria's voice among them caused her eyes to turn heavy from sleep. She finally allowed herself to be weak, to be a coward, and to feel repulsed remembering the blood and the mangled body she'd been forced to touch. She found that if she remembered it all correctly, perhaps she could get over it and move on.

As she had done so many times before.

Much later, half-conscious, but with a mind clear of the day's terrors, she whispered so that only the Hound could have heard her, had he been awake, "You know, I thought of you on my wedding night."

In the next moment she was fast asleep and she could not see a pair of grey eyes shining in the dark, or feel their smothering gaze. A pair of long arms fought an invisible battle against a mighty foe to stay right where they were, holding hard to the rough blankets, careful not to offend the only sacred thing in their life by unwanted attention.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and for encouraging me with comments.


	9. The Prompter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where a trial by fire is thwarted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I own nothing.

**Sandor**

_The caverns are dark and full of terrors_ , the Hound thought as they approached the clearing, crawling through a sinuous tunnel, and hated himself for it. _Next I will write songs myself, it will go nicely with a bowl of raspberries the Imp offered me for turning craven._

A hooded figure of a woman sat immobile, lost in her thoughts, in the heart of the giant weirwood whose branches and roots grew in all directions from the centre of the caves, spreading unevenly along many narrow passages used to go in and out, like tentacles of an oversized kraken, lost and ossified in the riverlands, too far away from its home on the high seas.

A blond man and a blond woman were tied in the middle of a large black pit, back to back, their bodies a perfect match, mirroring each other in size and strength. They both wore only a brown peasant tunic and a pair of dirty smallclothes clearly sewn for men. The woman's cheek was bandaged and the man was a sword hand short. _A pretty, there, for the little bird,_ the Hound thought, observing Sansa advancing in front of him. She showed no reaction to the spectacle before their eyes and just did her best to keep her balance and move forward, in heavy monk winter robes she wore over her dress.

The pit was encircled with weirwood branches cracking from dryness, almost bidding to be lit.

The space around the pit was crowded with smallfolk and outlaws at arms, who came to see the sentencing to death of Ser Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, and his whore, Lady Brienne of Tarth. The list of crimes was long and confirmed by R'hllor, the Lord of Light, or so read the false priest, Thoros of Myr.

The veiled woman started talking slowly, from her seat of white wood, in a gurgling inhuman language Thoros had to interpret for the other outlaws and the smallfolk alike. All bowed to the ground and listened to her every word as if she was some kind of deity herself.

She told them all how the Kingslayer sent his regards to Lady Catelyn Stark, in form of Roose Bolton killing her eldest son Robb Stark at the Red Wedding, before most of other guests from the north were murdered in cold blood, in violation of every right sacred in the eyes of gods and men. Only a precious few were kept as hostages but that was no matter, for the Kingslayer was finally going to pay for all the evils done and ordered in the name of the House Lannister.

Awe descended on the crowd when Lady Stoneheart finished talking, and looks of implacable hatred were the reward of the prisoners, who for their part looked as if they would both wish to talk, if only their mouths were not stuffed with rags so that they could barely breathe.

 _And breathe they would not for long,_ thought Sandor Clegane, because Thoros approached the pit carrying a burning torch. The Hound felt nameless rage taking hold of his heart while the mob cheered the false priest on, their hearts coming to a joint stop in expectation to see the prisoners suffer.

Someone shouted gleefully: "Save yourself now if you can, Lannister!"

"Try shitting gold for all the good it'll do to you," bellowed another.

The flames rose high around the pit.

The smoke, together with the breathing of so many living beings, sucked all air out of the caves. Many coughed but they remained where they were to watch their enemy die. The fire came close to Jaime, who tried to wiggle and turn, in order to face the ordeal himself, and keep the woman as far away from it, for as long as he could. _Always a true knight,_ Sandor mused, _and an insufferable bastard._ His golden mane gleamed and his green eyes looked strangely alive when the Hound could glimpse them through the flames.

 _Here we are,_ thought Sandor Clegane, _on with the buggering show._

**The Priest of R'hllor**

"Hear me, oh hear me, you good people of the Seven!" roared a voice in the middle of the crowd. A tall thin man in the attire of the holy brother of the Seven pushed his way through the tangle of warm bodies and threw a thick blanket for horse over the first line of flames. He stomped on it unafraid of getting burnt, repeating the process frantically until all the fire was put out. Then he stood firmly next to the prisoners as if he was one of them. Holding a scorched blanket in his hands, he faced a never anointed queen on her weirwood throne.

"I, the Elder Brother of the Quiet Isle by the grace of the High Septon, beg you to stop this folly! In the name of the Seven, the prisoners have to be brought to justice of the lawful king!"

Thoros of Myr saw how the eyes of the Kingslayer's whore were filled with sudden hope, and she squeezed the stump on the right arm of her companion with reassurance, while his leaf-coloured eyes only flickered, amused, as if he paused to consider the latest turn of his own uncertain destiny.

"There is no lawful king in this land! The boy ruling in King's Landing is the Kingslayer's bastard son, an abomination born of incest with his sister, Queen Cersei!" Thoros of Myr hurried to proclaim the belief of the crowd.

"You spoke truly," replied the monk. "There may be no lawful king. So why are you taking justice in your own hands? Queen Cersei will be judged for her treasons and fornications! I for one was invited to attend her trial, as are all the high servants of the Faith in all of the Seven Kingdoms."

"R'hll…" Thoros started but he was stopped in the middle of the word.

"-R'hllor, you said?" the man of the Seven admonished further. "Did your mothers burn the candles to R'hllor or to the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone? Did your fathers burn people in the name of the faceless god from across the narrow sea or did they come to the Father, the Warrior and the Smith for help? Won't the Stranger take us all in the end? People of the Seven, why have you abandoned the faith of your forefathers and embraced foreign lies? Will R'hllor regrow your ruined crops?"

The gathered spectators moved away slightly, to let forward three more hooded monks, a huge one with a bandaged shoulder, and two more men of more modest size clinging to his shadow.

"Why have you come here, brother? There are shorter ways from the Trident to King's Landing," said Lady Stoneheart, and Thoros conveyed the remarks of his lady in a calm, steady voice.

"I bring a message for you, my lady," said the Elder Brother.

"Show yourself!" Thoros did his duty, and repeated her words again.

The Elder Brother lowered his hood and discarded his travelling cloak. A thin tall man in his middle forties showed no concern, or fear for his life, only the humbleness proper for a man of the Faith. His eyes were narrow and darker than the caves, his head bold and scarred, with some grey looking stubble starting to break its way through the thick skin above his ears.

"I don't know you," was spoken quietly from a weirwood throne, and echoed, in the pit.

Lady Stoneheart mirrored the gesture of the Elder Brother and revealed herself. Her dark cloak was left on the throne, and a face of a dead woman, with her throat cut and her cheeks terribly disfigured by deep gashes in her grey flesh, walked towards the newcomers, receiving respectful mute courtesies mingled with fear from her people. Thoros of Myr followed his lady closely, setting his sword aflame in righteous anger, and so did Anguy, the archer, and at least ten men armed with swords and axes. All the newcomers and the prisoners alike were soon completely surrounded and targeted by a deadly weapon, ready to be launched at the command of their lady.

"My lady," said one of the smaller monks in a hushed voice, fighting shyness and his own fears, "the message is not plain, and only you can understand it. Let us relay it and be gone. Our brother's opinion of your justice is his own."

Thoros noted how the Elder Brother seemed surprised with the statement, as if he didn't expect it at all.

Lady Stoneheart motioned to Thoros, who obeyed and lowered the cowls of the monk speaking and of the huge one, who would not leave his side. Both of their faces were hidden with white masks showing only their mouth and the eyes, lined with crimson colour of blood. Thoros tried to peel off the masks but they wouldn't come off, and when he showed his unsuccessful hands to Lady Stonehart, he noticed that his fingers got burnt from touching the material. Both monks had long dark hair and the smaller one spoke flatly: "The old gods have no mercy for R'hllor. The masks we wear are a token of friendship given to the Seven by the First Men, in the times when there was peace in the Seven Kingdoms."

"I know you," said Lady Stoneheart through Thoros' mouth, walking toward the last covered newcomer. "You wed and then buried a woman, have you not? After swearing your undying love to her married sister for years?"

Undead hands rose to clutch the man's face, but before she could reach him, the man defended himself by pulling a long string of parchment from under his cloak with his left hand, revealing as he did it that his right arm had been cut in the shoulder.

"Who are you?" asked Lady Stoneheart. Her gurgle had sounded uncertain.

"A prompter," squeaked the man trying hard to sound as if he were very lowborn, "y' know, m'lady, a poor bastard who trots the Seven Kingdoms serving the mummer companies. I make my coin whispering the correct words to them players 'cause no one'll cheer to the maimed man on the stage."

Thoros noticed how the masked couple observed the prompter with genuine interest and the small masked monk said, mercifully, "He is right, my lady. The message we carry is but a part of a mummers' show on its way to King's Landing. It will be played entirely after the trial of the queen. He came with us to help us give the message to you. For we're not mummers as you can see, just humble servants of the Faith. If you ever believed in seven faces of one god, I beg you, let us play it and be gone."

R'hllor's servant felt the cold rage mounting inside his lady, and his own blood shivered when he transmitted her next words, which made him wonder if Beric made a right decision when he gave his life for hers. "If your message is a deceit, you will all burn! The death of my son shall be avenged!

The crowd observed speechless, the spectacle before them promising more screams of dying than they expected to see when that day began. Lady Stoneheart ordered the Elder Brother to be tied together with the two prisoners before the other two monks would be allowed to play the message.

The prompter hurried to hide himself behind the tied prisoners and unrolled his parchment, ready to do his job. The small masked monk stood next to the huge one and waited.

**Sandor**

The Hound couldn't rest in Sansa's presence the night before, reckless but also profoundly content on the levels of his being he didn't know existed, or tried his best to ignore them. _You really are a dog,_ he cursed himself, _happy with the scraps from your master's table._

The sleep must have tricked him only at first light and thus he overslept the early morning discussion Sansa and the singer must have had with Gendry - Sandor finally bothered to learn the name of the boy too stubborn to die. As a consequence of the talk he missed, a new scene was written for the bloody show, so fast that the Hound didn't even have time to read it before they set out with this Gendry, who would guide them to one of the entrances to the caves. With haste and some luck, they would reach them before anybody would burn. _Fire is for the wights,_ thought Sandor, _not for the living._

The wagon was pulled by six strongest horses to move faster, and Littlefinger complained from it all the way, claiming he was not going to take part in that madness. But Sansa stubbornly joined the vanguard of the rescue party, so Baelish also went, unable to let his _investment_ go.

Sandor Clegane and the Elder Brother rode next to the wagon in silence and the Hound noticed that the monk was not as bad in the saddle any longer as he had been when they left the Quiet Isle. With the brown cloak of the Faith billowing behind him, the Hound could almost imagine him as a hedge knight, wielding the wooden lance in village tourneys to the delight of the peasant wenches.

The little bird graced the Hound with a single furtive look of her bright blue eyes before she had stepped on the wagon and said when no one was listening, "Please, trust me. There is only one way to reach my mother's heart if she has any left, and it is this one."

Perplexed, the Hound wondered what the brave companions of Beric Dondarrion had to do with the late Lady Catelyn Stark, in full knowledge that he, Sandor Clegane, would be capable of killing his own mother if Sansa asked it of him in that voice.

xxxxxx

"Ned, what did father tell you?" asked Sansa and the Hound was back in the firepit with all his sharpened senses, turning his good ear to hear the reply Baelish was whispering.

"He said you were prowling the battlements at night, more than usually. And in Raventree your septa saw you flushed late in the evening. You told her you went training but no one trained that night," the Hound rasped slowly. He had to repeat the buggering words correctly to give the singer a little more time to play his part.

"And?" asked Sansa mildly.

"Lyanna," the Hound stressed, remembering the singer's remark that mentioning names was important for the plan to work. "They think you took a lover."

"Me, Ned?" replied Sansa carelessly, "I'm not like our older brother Brandon!"

"I know, Lya", replied the Hound and paused waiting for the Littlefinger to tell him the rest of what the singer and Sansa wrote together before they embarked on a crazy errand to rescue the Kingslayer and his lady _knight_ from _fire,_ and _not_ in a peace loving way the Elder Brother imagined it would happen.

Sandor Clegane retained the whispered phrase immediately. To the ignorance of many, he was good in his letters, but when he set out to repeat it, the meaning escaped from his tongue.

All he saw was Sansa.

He forgot he stood in a quenched firepit where once he had nearly lost his life to Beric Dondarrion, who then declared that the Lord of Light had other purposes for the Hound. _Such as miserably failing to die under the tree,_ thought the man in question.

He saw Sansa and he heard her whisper it again. She repeated it in his head many times over, " _I thought of you on my wedding night."_

He saw her through the mask as she truly was, and found that there was so much more he wanted to tell her from his own heart, the singer and his verses be damned to seven hells. The white mask was hiding his burns, and being able to say it as if he was talking _about_ her, and not to her, made it a lot easier to tell it true.

 _No one will know I meant this,_ he thought. _Words are less then wind, fickle, passing, false._

"No, Lya, you're not Brandon Stark who shared the bed of Ashara Dayne, and then received in his own all the wenches he could find willing in her household.

But I am not him either.

For if I was betrothed to a woman as beautiful as Catelyn Tully, I would never even dream to look upon another. But I am only the second son of a noble house, and a soldier with a cold heart, unworthy of a great lady."

"What would you do, Ned, if your betrothal to her would still come to pass?" asked Sansa of the Hound, in a tremulous voice.

 _She knows I'm inventing this and she's afraid,_ thought the Hound numbering the opponents and their weapons directed at them from outside the pit. He ignored Littlefinger's frantic attempts to make him say the correct words from behind Jaime, and spoke his mind freely once again.

To Sansa. To the only woman ever who unwillingly dug out a piece of his human soul even Gregor could not kill, and not for the lack of trying.

"I would keep faith with her and worship her forever. Her auburn hair shining like the sun setting in the West, her eyes more blue than the skies I've seen in the North, and her soul too kind for the world of mortal men."

"That is so beautiful, Ned," offered Sansa, her eyes suddenly red as the slits of the mask.

 _Why does she always have to be crying?_ thought the Hound.

"And I would throw myself at her feet and beg her to have me," Sandor Clegane spoke solemnly and yet somehow managed to hear Littlefinger's nervous whisper warning him to at least swear that he would be faithful to his betrothed only by the old gods and not the new, and forget he was a bloody septon, because that was what Ned Stark would have done.

"Lyanna, I swear to you, I swear it by the old gods for all time to come," the Hound made his vow to Sansa, and to Sansa alone, "I would die for my betrothed if needs be."

**Sansa**

"The rest of this story, my lady, you can hear if you come and see the show in King's Landing," said Sansa evenly to a creature whom she refused to think of as her mother, awaiting its judgement. "The singer who devised it came from the north. He was given bread and mead in the Greywater Watch and found great inspiration for his tale in the words of Lord Howland Reed, or so he told us."

 _This cannot be my mother,_ Sansa thought. Lady Catelyn would never had Jeyne Heddle hanged or Gendry's guts spilled out, not even after the Freys had killed all her hopes.

The creature croaked in broken voice and cloaked itself, staggering backwards to the centre of the weirwood. The heretic priest followed it, his sword still on fire, unable to translate the shrieks of his mistress in coherent human speech. The other members of the Brotherhood without Banners, as Gendry called the fellowship Sansa was facing, took it as a sign to cut down the monks and the prisoners alike. Sansa stood close to the Hound and felt how every inch of his body got tense. The Elder Brother who remained silent during their mummery bellowed from the top of his lungs:

"Your lady did not order our death! She's leaving with your priest! Stop this madness!"

But his words were in vain because the archer, Anguy, as Sansa had heard the others called him, yelled back:

"You lying bastard! I saw you, you killed Lem! I know it's you by your height and your brown cloak. You killed him in cold blood! Just like the Hound killed Gendry and Jeyne.

Sansa watched in shock how a black shaft of an arrow spun towards the middle of the Elder Brother's chest, when the Hound jumped forward like a shadowcat to push the monk out of harm's way, succeeding only partially because the dark feathered death must have pierced his ribs despite missing his heart. The Elder Brother fell with eyes wide open and Sansa ran to his side. She heard the Hound rasp, "Jaime! Here!", giving to Ser Jaime Lannister the hiltless dagger the Elder Brother carried on his hip. Petyr's sharp mind made him relinquish his weapon to the lady knight who had already cut her bonds and stood ready to fight.

The steel clashed to steel until the world burst in flames from behind the pit. A cloud of black smoke, a smell of burnt wood, and twenty armed men rode in from the forcefully widened weirwood tunnel, attacking the smallfolk and the outlaws, led by Lord Tytos Blackwood and Ser Lyn Corbray.

Last came Mance Rayder in his cloak of white, black and red, swaying a sword left and right. All cowered before him, from the harbinger of certain death. And he was followed by a flock of ravens, an omen of adverse fate.

"My lord," said Lord Blackwood to Jaime Lannister when the battle was over. "We were almost too late. The word is the Lannister always pays his debts. I want my son Hos back in exchange for saving your ass. If the Others didn't take him." Ser Jaime looked unscathed, he observed a bloody dagger in his left hand, and did not deign Lord Blackwood with a reply.

Corbray took Baelish under his wing, and Sansa decided to stay with the Elder Brother. She tried to feel the beating of his heart, but she could not. The Hound didn't leave their side during the fight and as far as she could see he didn't even kill anybody, he just caught the archer with his bare hands before that man could have shot anybody else, and held him firmly by his throat.

"Pray, tell us all now," the Hound rasped, "who killed Gendry and Jeyne?"

"The Houn..." Anguy tried to say but the air was choked from his lungs and a blade of a greatsword poised on his belly.

"Tell us truth if you don't want to die like Gendry did!"

"L… L… Lem and I did. Her ladyship commanded it! Because he let Podrick Payne and Ser Hyle go."

"And what did Jeyne do, brave archer of the brave companions?" if the Hound's rasp could kill, it would, Sansa was certain.

"She just said Gendry was r… r… right to do so… because they were innocent even if the Kingslayer was guilty."

"Did she now?" the Hound made a tiny tickling cut on the archer's tummy. Red blood trickled and Sansa couldn't stop herself.

She jerked forward, grabbed the Hound's sword hand and said: "No! He is not worth it. Let Gendry tell the good folk the rest himself. Let them judge him by their law."

Sansa noticed with satisfaction how her words that Gendry was alive made the archer even paler than the threats of death.

When she looked around, the blond lady knight dropped to one knee in front of her in a proper courtesy, the dignity and honour of her gesture not diminished by the funny sight she made dressed up only in male tunic and smallclothes.

"My lady Stark," she said. "We have finally found you. Surely, Lady Catelyn, your mother, she must realise that now."

"Her name is Alayne, Alayne Stone, she's my natural daughter," Petyr tried to suggest from behind.

 _His courage is back now that the evil that my mother has become is gone,_ thought Sansa bitterly, discovering that her weirwood mask and the dead monk's cowl she wore in disguise have both dropped down, revealing a cascade of brown coloured curls falling to the small of her back. The auburn in her hair shone above her forehead and ears despite the dimness of the caves. She used the last die Petyr gave her on the Quiet Isle, and as the Elder Brother had pointed out, the herbs it was made of could not be picked easily in winter.

Sansa bore her Tully blue eyes to the sapphire blue ones of the kneeling woman, but when she finally spoke, it was with the coldness of the North. "I am Sansa Stark. But that creature killing innocents is not my mother. Lady Catelyn Stark is dead."


	10. Her Name Was Jeyne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where R'hllor is not to be disregarded

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I own nothing.
> 
> A sad chapter, this one.

**Jaime**

"You didn't kill Jeyne and Gendry, we were all delighted to hear that. So what else did you not do, _holy_ _brother_ , from the atrocities they accuse you of late?" asked Ser Jaime Lannister of Sandor Clegane when they rode together at the end of the rescue party, returning to the camp of the every day more colourful company of men and beasts on the way south to King's Landing. They left far behind them the weirwood infested caves of the Brotherhood without Banners, and a multitude of smallfolk on the way to their homes, mouths filled with fresh gossip.

"The Imp must have told you about the Blackwater. He sat the bay on fire. I ran. After that I dug graves. That's pretty much all there is to say."

Jaime felt light like a feather, or a flower petal. To experience that was not very manly but he didn't care. He killed his first man with his left hand, without even using a sword. It was an ugly outlaw and a peasant, but it was in a close fight, and the memory still tasted inexorably sweet, as if it was one of his greatest achievements worthy of an entry in the White Book of the Kingsguard. _The day when Ser Jaime the cripple of House Lannister almost became a warrior again._

"And why risk your skin for the liege lord whose cause you deserted?" he pursued a conversation.

"Not for you. For the company I keep."

"For Sansa Stark?" Jaime asked in plain disbelief.

"You've heard the Elder Brother defending you. That's who he is, he would have burned with you, for justice and for his faith. Might die for it still, from the looks of it. It so happens he met the Lady of Tarth on her travels before she ended up bound to you and sentenced to death. I have no idea what she told him, but he said she had honour and ought to be saved. Just like he took a stray dog in when he didn't need to. I owe him my life so I came along," the Hound drawled slowly, sounding indifferent, almost bored. "Lady Stark is with Baelish. You want to ask questions about her, ask him. Last thing I heard he was still loyal to the crown."

"And to himself, laying a hand on the last Stark with a true claim to Winterfell," Jaime said bitterly. "Did you know that he sent a false Arya Stark north to marry the bastard of Roose Bolton? Not even my father could have devised such a thing by himself. So that Roose and after him his bastard, Ramsay, get a better hold to the title of the Warden of the North."

"I'd make a better Warden of the West," said the Hound mockingly.

"Others take me, you just might," the lion jested back.

"And the Others might just hear you and heed to your wise counsel," the Hound retorted in kind, remembering the terror of the cold.

Jaime Lannister turned dead serious. "So what now?"

"Your golden hand, shiny sword and white armour are all gone, could be they were sold for food by the outlaws. You're lucky you found your horse. I'll borrow you some monk clothing to cover your bony ass. We'll find a dress or an armour for your lady knight, whatever pleases her more. Then you go your way and I go mine."

"And Lady Brienne's sword?"

"Gone. Mance only found a rounded wooden shield painted with a sigil of old, that could be hers."

"Who's Mance? And where will you go?"

"That's no concern of yours, Kingslayer."

"You called me Jaime in the firepit."

"Aye," Sandor Clegane's mouth twitched in a repulsively looking uncontrolled laugh of contentment. "I'll go where it pleases me, Jaime."

"Sandor, see, that sounded much better," said Ser Jaime Lannister with a broad grin of his own.

Sandor Clegane, contrary to all the rumours, did not turn rabid like his brother, and the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard was glad for it. _My duty in the riverlands is truly done now,_ he thought. _I can go back to King's Landing and tell my son Tommen the truth."_

His stomach clenched at the thought that Cersei's trial had yet come to pass. Jaime was unable to confess, not even to himself, whether he wished to see her again dead, or alive.

 _The Hound has Lady Sansa and if you don't come with me, alone, he will kill her,_ Brienne's lies echoed in his spirit. They wouldn't leave his mind ever since he learned of her treason, not even when he set himself between the insufferable wench and the approaching fire. Her falseness rang so hard in his head that the fire didn't seem nearly hot enough as it should have been. He was saved in the end, and all he could do was think how Brienne's betrayal had hurt him more than when he learned that Cersei had slept with Lancel, and Osney and the Moon Boy, and only the Seven knew who else, for all that his little brother Tyrion had known.

 _That's also over, now,_ he thought, resigned. _The quest is over._ _Brienne can go home._

**Sansa**

"Gendry told us what became of my mother but it was still horrible to see it in truth," Sansa said to Mance when they rode back, forgetting her decision not to talk to him at all. "Where could she have gone?"

"I don't know," replied the King-beyond-the-Wall. "But I know one other thing. If I ever turn into that, into a wight, I'd rather be burned alive then continue to exist in that fashion. All my people know about my wish."

"You say you're a bard, not a lord. Who are then your people?"

"I left them behind, I had to," Mance replied with immense sadness in his dark eyes and Sansa regretted asking the question. "When I can, I will go back. And if I'm alive when all this is over, I will go to Oldtown, and speak to the maesters of the Citadel, to learn from them where my heart has gone."

"How did you know Jon?" she ventured on hopefully safer ground.

"A crow knows another, as it should be. And what do you know about Brother Gravedigger? What was the name he'd been given as a child?" the singer appeared to be quite curious.

"Have you seen his face?"

"Yes, he showed it to me the first time we spoke."

"You cannot be from the White Harbor, then," Sansa said in amazement, imagining the vast lands across the narrow sea, far away from Westeros, where lived people who have not heard of and who would not have recognised the Hound, widely known and feared in all of the Seven Kingdoms. The Free Cities, the ruins of the Old Valyria, the Dothraki Sea and the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai! In the Vale she frequently imagined that her sister Arya was not dead but instead on a long journey to see them all.

"That's what he said as well," said Mance, amused. "Keep your secrets then, Sansa. As I will do with mine. Some truths are simply too terrible to behold."

"I have learned that at great cost, my lo... Mance," Sansa said and continued without courtesies. "Do you know why the masks you gave us burned the priest of the god of flames?"

"Did they now? I don't know, Sansa. I am but a man, no more, no less."

He continued and Sansa listened with apprehension. "Some folk in the north say that the masks possess a magic of old, of the children of the forest. Others say that they help to see the truth of things, or protect the wearer from harm. They're carved out of living weirwood. And the caverns which have been used here for the unsavoury judgments of the Lord of Light," Mance visibly shivered as if he was chasing away a ghost of a bad memory, "they belonged to the old gods, maybe they still do. There is no way of telling why the masks did that. Just like we don't know why a large flock of bloody ravens came after us all the way from the Raventree Hall, if not to roost on Lady Stoneheart's abandoned throne."

"They were like a black tempest," said Sansa in a dreamy voice. "Black army flapping their wings in the dankness of the caves..."

"The Elder Brother, will he make it?" Pondering on the mystery of the masks and the ravens, Sansa finally asked the question she dreaded to put before. For death also came with them all the way, like an old friend.

The old monk hung lifeless over a horse between them, thin and long like a half empty sack of flour, squeezed ruthlessly on the edges from too much usage.

"If there's a decent healer to be found among the people here, maybe he will," Mance did not sweeten the truth and for that too Sansa was grateful.

She sighed and looked backwards where the Hound and Ser Jaime Lannister were exchanging words. She fervently hoped that Gendry was right, and that Ser Jaime had indeed sent Lady Brienne to look for her and for Arya to return them to Lady Catelyn in fulfilment of his oath. Or her trial would be the next one after the Queen Cersei's if he decided to bring her to King's Landing by force, once he would rejoin the lost surviving part of his army, prowling the woods of the Riverlands, amongst the wolves and the horrors of the cold. She suspected that Petyr would stand in the first row and approve the wisdom of King Tommen, when she would be put to her death. Her head would roll down the stony steps of the Great Sept of Baelor, as her father's did before, and then it would be mounted on a spike for the multitude to watch.

She wondered who the new King's Justice would be for Ser Ilyn Payne was dead and burned on the pyre in Pennytree.

Sansa noticed how the Hound carelessly tossed his hair backwards, away from his eyes. Had he not been wearing the cowl, he would have bared his entire face to Ser Jaime without a second thought, not stopping to comb his hair over his burns as he did in front of all in the Red Keep.

A desire came over Sansa, innocent but rushing like a fast mountain spring through her veins, unstoppable, wild. She wished she was Ser Jaime and that the Hound was at ease in her presence, laughing at her jest, listening to her voice.

 _Would he fight for me if I asked for a trial by combat for supposedly killing Joffrey?_ Sansa wondered. _Would he wear my favour or would he just mock me for it all?_

 _I would die for my betrothed, if needs be,_ he told her before the old gods. Sansa's tummy turned with unknown sickness for she was already married, even if only in name, and the Hound could become betrothed to another woman if he so wished. In the Vale she understood that the men of the Faith sired bastards just like any other men, or abandoned the Faith and founded families. _Even Ser Gregor had wives, and he was a monster._

The night air was crisp and cold when they reached the wagon. They loaded the Elder Brother next to a sleeping Gendry and trotted, slowly, back to the camp to rest, content because that night, at least, it didn't look like it was going to snow.

**The Gutted Boy**

Her face was thin and pale, sorrowful as the bare lands in winter. Her eyes and lips held no life, her hair was no longer shining; it was dark and dull and her breathe felt fetid and freezing. _Her name was Jeyne._

Gendry didn't have much time until the guards circling the camp would pass by and notice what he was about to do. He prayed to the Lord of Light to guide his steps, remembering the tale how Thoros blew the breath of life in the body of Lord Beric Dondarrion, when he lay slain by Ser Gregor the Mountain, and how Lord Beric then gave it all away to bring Lady Catelyn back among the living.

Digging her out with his bare hands was not easy because he was still very weak: he barely made it on his own from the wagon to her grave. Luckily, it was not deep. He was grateful that the queer foreigner with the lute did not go through with his idea to burn her.

 _Her name was Jeyne_ , he thought again and hot tears ran down his cheeks. _We have to find Willow and leave somewhere safe to spend the winter, far away from m'lords and m'ladies and from the Brotherhood, too. The orphans have no brothers, with or without the banners. It was just me, so stupid to believe it could be any different._

He remembered the words he'd been given to read while the gentle lady treated his wound. _Lovely Lyanna of House Stark._ Why did it have to be that name of all the noble names? _I should have stayed with her, not smith armour for the Brotherhood and hope that Lord Beric's gift of knighthood was going to make me worthy of m'lady one day,_ thought Gendry, remembering a courageous little girl with mousy hair, wondering where she was.

 _Serves me right,_ he mused, _Ser Gendry of the Hollow Hill, the Lord of Fools._ There was no escaping one's condition and he felt as if he had uncovered it way too late for his own good.

 _Her name was Jeyne_ , Gendry recalled his thoughts back to what he was doing, digging the cold ground to reveal the rest of the fragile body in front of him. Blood came from under his nails but he did not relent. The smell of wet ground was sickening and he felt an oppressing urge to lay down and dream forever, forsaking everything. _Not a good idea_ , he concluded. _Her name was Jeyne and she would have done the same for me._

Her body was cold and her skin felt so dead, the bristle sensation when one would accidentally brush her always busy hands in passing lost, the voice which called Willow to come home gone silent for good. _Her name was Jeyne._

Gendry started the fire, crouching, careful to hide the small flame from the rest of the camp with the breadth of his shoulders. He leaned over it and inhaled the smoke and the hot air above the fire as much as he could, until his lungs started to hurt and he was almost choking.

"Lord of Light, help me," he said. "Cast your light over us. Bring her back."

Gendry breathed the fire of life in Jeyne's stiff mouth and a wolf howled, distracted, in the distance.

She rose smoothly and grabbed him by the arms, unnaturally strong and menacing, the look in her eyes threatening, more lifeless than before, the grip on him mortal, unkind. She was alive, yes, but what kind of life it was! Evil and ruthless, not meant to be. She bared her teeth and they looked sharp. He could see the black circle around her neck where the rope had been.

The creature he created threw him down and prepared to rip him apart as he lay on the cold muddy ground, sprawled in the shallow grave that was to be hers, but would now be his. He was ready. There was nothing else for him to do. All people he had ever cared about betrayed him, left, or died. He wondered if at least Master Tobho Mott was still alive in the capital.

"Jeyne," he almost whimpered. "Please, forgive me."

Far away in the woods it started to snow. Through the night mist Gendry could see a separation. A line clearly drawn between the trees still rustling with autumn leaves and the forest which fell victim to the implacable winter.

She screeched and shrill voices answered her from afar, from the land that had surrendered to ice. The last thing he saw was a piece of solid wood colliding with his face in ferocious speed.

**Mance**

"Where was your head, boy?" shouted Mance Rayder shaking Gendry awake. "Have you southrons heard nothing about leaving the dead be? She would have killed you if I didn't rise on time!"

Mance thanked the ice in his veins for once again warning him of the danger; the weakness of easy sleep was gone when the winter decided to follow him south. He only regretted arriving too late to burn her. The cursed girl ran with unnatural swiftness when he tossed a burning log at her. Only her long black hair caught flame, but she would extinguish it later, in the fresh snow. The wights had never been an easy prey.

"Her name was Jeyne," squeezed the pale wounded boy through his teeth.

"It rhymes with pain," stated the one handed man with the golden hair whose pelt they saved that day, approaching with a nobility of a spoiled cat. "You are Mance?" he asked.

The King-beyond-the-Wall understood that he was in the presence of one of the most powerful and dangerous kneelers in the realm but he could not bring himself to care. _One hand can only do so much, he judged,_ trusting his new host of men from every origin to do his bidding in case of need. "I am," he answered slowly.

"I listened to the piece of this play of yours gagged in the firepit and I found it most enlightening," Jaime's green eyes flickered, reflecting the fire. "I was wondering if it contains a character of a young boy who will swear the Kingsguard vows against the wishes of his father."

"That would depend on who the boy is, and who the father," Mance said coldly to the enemy, the man who nearly killed the father Jon had, and crippled one of his younger brothers.

"Just as I thought," the green eyes flashed, then gazed pensive to the eeriness of the haunted forest beyond them, and turned their attention to the Brother Gravedigger, lurking nearby, resembling a giant tree in his odd calmness. "You'd tell me if I was imagining this, would you not?"

"Aye. And it's not the first nor the worst such thing we've seen when coming down from the north," rasped the tall monk.

"What is to be done?"

"One can only warn people to stay in and burn fires at knight. Fire can ruin the dead ones. A black stone called obsidian can fight their masters. So can Valyrian steel," Brother Gravedigger offered with utmost aloofness.

"Good that the Lady Stoneheart took the only two such swords we had, then," Ser Jaime added. "Perhaps my duty is to travel West, before returning to King's Landing. To give such warnings as can be given."

The screams rang through the woods behind the invisible line dividing the land still alive and green, at least in part, from the bleak whitened desert taken hostage by winter. The entire camp was up from the noise, staring into the distance, not wanting to know what was happening under the incessant snow and why they were being spared. The pig-headed boy blinked and slowly straightened up. A large purple bruise flowered on his forehead as if he had been hit by a bronze weapon of the Magnar of Thenn, wrought in the far north of the lands beyond the Wall, and not by a simple piece of wood. The strength of the blow must have been deadly and he was lucky to still draw breath as a human and not as something else.

"Where is she?" Gendry had the nerve to ask.

"With others of her kind!" Mance pointed angrily to the shrieking woods.

"Will you kill me now?" came the next question from the shallow grave.

"He won't," said the Gravedigger steadily. "He will hand you a piece of parchment and make you read. It can get worse than just dying, believe it."

"Brother Gravedigger," Mance chuckled. "You know me well. I was going to ask him to read again the piece he read before, I had some thought on how to improve it during the raid at the caves."

"Fighting makes you write songs? How unbearably sweet," the Hound mocked the bard.

"Is it still about Lady Stark?" Gendry had to know.

The singer nodded and said in a suddenly courteous tone, "Yes. I thought maybe you don't want to stay here, now." He waved his arm again towards the terror of the dark. "You could go with us to the capital and read a part in my play. Die some other time. What do you say?"

"It hurts," said Gendry, absent-minded for a second, rubbing his head.

"It will hurt more," rasped the Gravedigger. "Live with it."

"I want to read," the boy made up his mind. "It helped yesterday. For the pain. "Here" he touched his head. "And here," Gendry put his right hand over his still beating heart.

Mance Rayder had to fiddle in his pockets to find a short wrinkled piece of parchment where the lines have been crossed and rewritten many times, the latest words scribbled on the margins in very small nervous letters. The part of Robert Baratheon still eluded him and his first attempt at it was very crude, even if young Robert was told to be frivolous at heart. Another difficulty was Aerys, the Mad King, which had to be solved soon, and the choice was between Blackwood and Corbray, _maybe the latter one_ , he had not decided yet.

Sometimes hearing your words being read by others would reveal plenty of what should be done about them, so Mance forgot about the unwelcome presence of Ser Jaime, and waited devotedly for the imprudent boy to speak.

"I was born in the Stormlands where people enjoy life. They drink, they gamble, and they whore," the boy started, embarrassed because he couldn't read fast, yet determined not to let his ignorance be seen.

"I became a man in the Vale, where people are strict and straightforward, daring, like a falcon's flight," the second sentence sounded more natural.

"I haven't gone north yet, but the only man I recognise as my true brother came from there. My brother in soul, if not in blood. And his Lord Father has talked to mine. His sister was promised to me, a maid honourable and pleasing to the eye, but savage in all her ways," Gendry was doing his best, but Mance found that it was not good enough.

"A lady who doesn't want to be one, they say, but still, a lady she remains," the expression on Gendry's face turned to brazen, and admiration crept into his speech. At what, Mance did not know, but the words finally lived in boy's mouth.

He continued with the stubborn fire only he possessed, the same fire that made him hold his guts in his hand and revive dead friends, "The direwolf banners are approaching, galloping down the kingsroad to seal my fate! Dust is on their heels and sun on their foreheads! She'll be coming with them, I know."

The boy hammered the last sentence, "And I have decided to offer my heart, such as it is, to virtuous Lyanna, of the House Stark."

"The Baratheons have a trace of dragon blood in them," commented Ser Jaime Lannister out of hand, and the King-beyond-the-Wall sharpened his mental sword and kept quiet. _I don't have a blood of any noble animal,_ he thought. _Yet I will spill mine in the end, as ignoble as it is, if it can save my people. I will not be there to see it any more, but I know that it will run equally bright and red like anyone else's._

**Sandor**

When the reading was over and it seemed that no one would attack them that night, Sandor Clegane walked to where Sansa veiled over the Elder Brother. Asleep, without a cowl, the brother of the Faith looked much younger than his roughly six and forty name days. Lady Brienne was seated a few meters to the side. She wouldn't talk to anyone since she was freed and the Hound felt queasy seeing a woman of her strength and size on the verge of tears, her eyes redder than he had ever seen them in his little bird, not even when Joffrey had her father killed.

"He seems at peace, yet I fear for his life," Sansa said when she heard his footsteps. "One of the other monks, the young one, I call him Benjen now, even if that is not his name, took out the arrow and bandaged the wound but he is not waking up."

"I could break a few necks tomorrow if the folk around here will not want to find us a healer," the Hound offered to do what he was good at.

"He wouldn't approve," Sansa pointed at the sleeping figure.

"Neither would you, wouldn't you?" he said wondering why he needed so much to hurt her with his words. "You missed the reading. Gendry read for Mance, Kingslayer and me, the singer's latest piece of folly, about how he longed to meet the _virtuous_ Lady Stark."

"Gendry looks… When his face was cleaned from gore, he looks too good, a bit like Renly Baratheon," Sansa said, weighing her words. "And another bit like Mya Stone, a friend I had in the Vale."

"I'm convinced that your husband wouldn't mind if you did a tumble or two with a good looking commoner on the way home to your warm marriage bed. Better that, than Baelish. It might give you joy," the Hound said, overriding the angry protests of Sandor Clegane, the man, in the far back of his conscious mind. He imagined Sansa holding Gendry's hand and smiling at his handsome unmarred face. "The Imp wouldn't have to know if he's a jealous type. Even if he doesn't strike me as one."

Sansa just opened her beautiful mouth and closed it again, gaping like a fish out of water, gulping, fighting for survival.

Sandor Clegane wanted to cut out his own foul tongue with his sword, but only more ugly words poured out of his mouth, unstoppable as the land-breaking torrents after the copious spring showers. "The boy has the looks as if he hasn't had a woman yet. Maybe you could teach him, sing him a pretty little song…"

Sansa appeared frail in the light of the embers of the fire, and paler than the Elder Brother on his dying bed. Sandor Clegane bit his tongue until his mouth was bleeding on the inside, forcing the salty liquid down his throat. It was the only way to stop talking, but the images of Sansa with other men, handsome, handsome, _whole_ , would not leave his mind, more twisted than his scarred flesh.

"Are you jealous?" her question came like a dagger in his ribs, simple, deadly and precise, the blade not less sharp for being dipped in the kindness of her voice. He shook his head and froze in one place, waiting for the next blow.

"What have I ever done to you that you judge me so?" she asked in all honesty and he could not muster the strength to give her the answer she deserved.

 _You showed me that the seven heavens existed,_ he thought, _but not for the likes of me._

They both stared in silence at the dying fire, observing the slow movement of the Elder Brother's chest, rising quietly up and falling down again, clinging to life against all odds.


	11. Back to Back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where nothing too terrible happens

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I own nothing.
> 
> Thank you for reading and giving any attention at all to this silly fanfic of mine
> 
> Merry Christmas everyone

**Brienne**

"Is this yours?" a deep voice rumbled at Brienne waking her up and she didn't even remember going to sleep.

The man may have been standing in front of her for a while and she could barely open her eyes swollen from crying. The daylight was dim and a fast passing gale of freshly perfumed wind sent unhappy chills down her spine. The insistent rumours of the camp being lifted and packed up for departure chased the phantoms of the night, and she found she could almost breathe.

Brienne blinked and saw her own rounded shield being held in front of her by one of the tallest men she had ever seen, wearing a cloak of a brother of the Faith. _He defended Lady Sansa in the pit,_ she recalled. _And then they argued over the body of the Elder Brother._

"Yes, it's mine, thank you," she said, stretching her left arm to take it over. The shield did not move.

"It has been recently repainted," the man said, examining it, not giving it away.

"The sigil it had before was en evil one. This one was more suited for my quest."

"Have you ever seen it before? The new sigil, I mean?"

"Why so many questions?" Brienne reacted, short tempered. There was one thing she learned from training with men: showing patience never got you anywhere.

"You're from Tarth? I'd say that's pretty far from the westerlands…" the voice was curious but also very disdainful so Brienne dived forward to get her shield. The man moved way faster than he had any right to do and she fell with her face to the ground. She got up, seething, wiped her nose, and spontaneously reached for her sword, only to remember that she didn't have one any more.

"Ugly and angry, are we?" the man was clearly rejoicing at her misery.

"Who are you?" asked Brienne, with righteous fury on the rise, making her voice way stronger than she felt on the inside in the last couple of days.

"The Gravedigger," he said and avoided her with ease when she tried to take her shield one more time by force. They ended up in a training stance for a fist fight. The man never removed his cowl and her legs were still bare, clad only in smallclothes tailored for men, the blanket someone gave her to warm up for the night forgotten on the cold ground.

She almost hit his face but he blocked it, and she swiftly moved aside to avoid a well aimed blow to her stomach. They exchanged some more insignificant attacks and passes until Brienne turned ferocious, remembering the cold look of betrayal in Ser Jaime Lannister's eyes when Lady Stoneheart led them to the pit. Jaime... _Ser_ Jaime looked through her, not at her, as if she had been a stone, or a tree, not worthy of being noticed. It was worse than when they first met and he was calling her wench and meant it. Brienne pretended she was going for the manly parts of her new enemy with her knee, but at the last possible moment she made a leap upwards and clashed with her head into his, leaving him disorientated for a short while. He regained his senses much sooner than she would expect, grabbed her by her shoulders and tossed her on the ground, not gently, but not too hard either.

"Why, what a lady! Not afraid for your fair face, fighting like that?"

"They call me the Beauty for a reason," Brienne squeezed through her teeth, feeling the soreness of the healing bite wound on her cheek from the blow she gave. "Not much fairness to lose to start with."

To her surprise, he offered her a hand to get up.

"You should have aimed at my shoulder," he said, pointing at the bandage he wore under his tunic, provoking her to contrary his counsel.

"But that would be dishonourable!" she uttered.

"In a real fight with an opponent like myself it might keep you alive," he said, handing her the shield and a bundle of brown fabric, smelling clean. "You might want these. I'm afraid we're a bit short on ladies' clothing around here."

He turned around to leave but then said, as an afterthought, in an indifferent voice which sounded strangely like an apology. "About the shield, I asked because before I came to the service of the Seven, very, very long time ago, I have seen such shield depicted in my childhood home. I've never seen it since. I just wanted to know."

Brienne decided to honour his almost apology by sharing a sincere thought of her own. "Yesterday evening, with Lady Sansa, you acted as if she had given you a rose."

That caught his interest. "A rose? Are you insane, woman?"

"You spoke to her with resentment. About what, I don't know. I didn't listen because it would not be proper, but I took note of your bearings being there by chance. I was like that when a knight gave me a rose and told me that was all I was going to have of him. Then, I was older and I joined an army. My fellow soldiers acted as if they wanted to win my heart, but it was only a bet among men about who would bed me first," Brienne surprised herself for being able to reveal that part of her life to a total stranger. It felt almost pleasant to allow the words to roll of her tongue. _It's because none of that matters now: I turned my back on Jaime, and he on me, in return._

"What do the rats of your potential suitors have to do with me? I hope you had a good sense to beat them bloody!"

"I did! But, please, let me finish! What I'm trying to say is that Lady Sansa is different."

"And why is that?" the huge man frowned incredulously.

"She opposed her mother to protect an enemy and a stranger. And she meant it. Every word of it."

"You've never heard that her father was such an honourable bugger that it got him killed? Must be his blood, not her intentions," the man commented, indifferent again.

"It's all the same. No matter where it comes from, I know that if Lady Sansa ever offered a rose, or bestowed her favour, she would do it because for her it would have a meaning."

"Or she wouldn't do it at all," the man of the Faith shook his head almost as if he wished to believe her. "And how would you know of all that's in a woman's mind?"

"Because if you look at me more closely, I am also a woman."

Her words provoked an odd broken laugh, resembling a bark, or the loud cheerful gurgling of the Lady Stoneheart.

"If you want to have some practice fighting on the way to the capital, I could show you a thing or two," he said and she realized it was his way of thanking her. "We could also spar with blades if you can get a weapon from one of the toads pretending to be tigers as we go."

"Thank you, it would please me greatly," she said, pulling open a bundle with clothing. It was brown and rough-spun and the size looked too big but it was going to be much better than standing barefoot in the half-frozen brown-green mud, or wearing a pink dress she was given by Lord Bolton once. Brienne didn't want to draw any unwanted attention to herself by being the last member of the company ready to depart. She wished to melt in and to avoid any encounter with Jaime for as long as possible, until she would grow strong enough to meet the rejection in his eyes with an even face.

**Mance**

"The king has to be fierce and have no mercy in this show," Mance said to Blackwood and Corbray, purposefully omitting the full name and the title of the king, despite that most men have already guessed behind the scenes that his play was about a great and tragic love between Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. Words dashed faster than swords, and bets were made if the legendary rape of Lyanna by Rhaegar was going to be shown on the stage. Mance was grateful that his main characters have been too busy since they left Raventree to hear any of those talks, because he suspected that their Rhaegar would respond by increasing a number of corpses to be burned, had he heard some deeply malicious, or worse, salacious proposals regarding Sansa.

Mance continued with instructions to players. "The king speaks to his son and scorns him for being too kind to his wife. Then they meet a lord and his daughter, and that is when the Jonquil in our story discovers that the unknown man she met several times when they were alone is married, and if that wasn't enough, a prince, and an heir to the Iron Throne. He discovers that the unknown woman he met is not a wildling, but truly a lord's daughter, a descendant of the most ancient noble house of Westeros, known for keeping their honour intact above all things. This discovery changes them forever. Let's do this properly, shall we? You all read the words, now speak them as if they were coming from your mouth, and the Lord Protector will help when they don't."

A stage was made of sleeping pallets turned upside down in front of the wagon where the wounded were recovering. Or, better said, Gendry was, and the Elder Brother lay in a deep slumber, drifting on and off between unconscious and merely asleep, the colour of his face completely gone, the cheeks sunken in. The popular belief in the camp was that he would rise as a wight, and that a gift of mercy was in order before building a pyre, so Mance would not lose a wagon from his sight. In the short time of their acquaintance, he grew a soft spot for the unyielding bald monk, although he was a kneeler and an unbeliever in the old gods.

Baelish was huddled under the wagon, close to the ground, so that the upper part of his body was protruding forward, in front of the wheels, his nose almost on the stage. The players could hear him well, but the viewers of the show, if there were any but Mance, would not be able to get a good look at him. That was then in order. The company was almost ready to ride out, and at least for the moment no one showed interest in the play.

"You let your wife enjoy too much freedom, my son. She sews and dines with her ladies, the Kingsguard is always with her, and she's rarely following your steps. Stop that, I command you! Or the common folk will say that you are not her son's father and that your son is not your true heir, Aegon, Sixth of His Name, and the future King of the Seven Kingdoms," Blackwood spoke in an even voice the part of the Mad King.

"She nearly died in childbed, father. I am only letting her regain her health, treating her as I ought to, for she will be my queen," said Rhaegar, clad in black under his monk's cloak. That, also, was fitting, as Rhaegar should wear black with a semblance of red rubies on his chest when they would perform the show for real. Mance, whom the old gods have made observant about the small differences, and many a times it helped him in the thick of things, wondered at the reason for the change. In place of rough-spun brown clothing, Rhaegar wore a simple but somewhat finer black long sleeved tunic, thick black breeches, and a pair of boots which was probably looted from one of the dead Lannister soldiers in Pennytree. There was a tiny yellow border with black details Mance could not distinguish from afar, sewn in dark fabric on both tunic and breeches, above his huge hands and newly acquired shoes, its pattern simple and unbent.

"That may be," Corbray took over the role of the king, with the help of Baelish who obediently did his prompting job from under the wagon, and Mance was pleased that the Lord Paragon was at least for the time being going with the flow. "But a man has to show his hand and rule, and the hand has to be firm. Or the flames of treason will ravage the crownlands and after all of the realm."

His Rhaegar did well, keeping a respectful tone but still making it obvious that he did not agree with his father: "The Grand Maester said once that the king is bound by duty to follow the laws of the land."

"The laws are for the people, not for the king," said Corbray. "A true king is beyond them as they are beneath him. Watch me closely and learn how to treat the high lords as they deserve. They are at your mercy and it is by your will alone that they will live, or die."

"Halt!" said Mance, unable to decide who should play Aerys.

"Make them say only one sentence, Mance, make them say it as if they're angry and you'll see which player is better," suggested the arrogant prisoner they saved from the death by fire. His eyes twinkled green while he clumsily packed his meager belongings under a nearby tree with his left hand. "They have to do this, watch me." Jaime Lannister ran to the makeshift stage in a gust of inspiration, letting his new monk's cloak billow behind to give grandeur to his gesture. He shouted from the bottom of his lungs, so that the entire camp could hear him, "Burn them all!"

Mance looked at the Kingslayer for the very first time without any prejudice. "Would you play the King?" he asked.

"I have not a faintest idea who you are, _Mance, With No Name_ , but we both know very well whom I should play in this show of yours," the Kingslayer said coldly. "I don't know what you wish to achieve in the capital but I warn you that your tale may not turn so popular. People in King's Landing still firmly believe that Rhaegar was a villain after all, and that my father was right to have their city sacked and their women raped.

"BURN THEM ALL!" bellowed Corbray imitating Lannister's scream and waving his longsword to appear bloodthirsty, while Blackwood just watched.

"Quite on the contrary," Mance said to Jaime, "I could find a role for you, but not the one which you see for yourself. But I do value your counsel on the Mad King."

To the players he said, "Very well, Lord Blackwood, you will be the lady's father then, since Lord Corbray here is so eager to play the king. Lady Stark please, on to the scene where you are presented to the king in the Darry castle, on the way to Harrenhall. Your father had to go there on an urgent errand so you joined him after leaving Raventree, just when the king came there with his son and a small retinue of knights. Lord Protector, be careful with your whispering duties, a man of your wits can do even better. The king and his son, please repeat the last lines as they are the key to the appearance of the Lord and the Lady Stark."

"Daven," Brother Gravedigger suddenly said like a warning, pointing to the woods he faced and then disappeared behind the wagon where the Lady Stark waited patiently to make her entrance already for a while. Baelish pushed his head more forward from under the wheels, toward the legs of Corbray and Blackwood still standing on the stage, to better see this "Daven". Mance forgot to scorn Rhaegar for running away, when he noticed a strong company, almost an army of men riding out of the woods, their banners held high, in crimson and gold, led by a good looking man with golden curls who immediately approached Ser Jaime Lannister.

"We thought you dead, like Ser Ilyn," said the man called Daven, and even Mance could guess, without seeing his family genealogy in a book about the great houses of Westeros, that the newcomer's last name was Lannister, a younger and less battered copy of the Kingslayer. Unlike his cousin, he didn't look dangerous or marked by the atrocities of life, plain to see behind the heartless expression on Ser Jaime's handsome face, and all over his badly healed right hand stump. At least if the person looking was once King-beyond-the-Wall and passed through ice and fire, facing the wrath of the white walkers and of R'hlllor alike, and lived to tell the tale, unscathed.

"Not dead yet, Daven, just enjoying the mummers' show. Do come and take a look! It gives me sweet memories of the Bloody Mummers who so kindly took my hand, as a prop in their kind of play," Jaime Lannister said cheerfully.

**Sansa**

Sansa did not understand why the Hound suddenly rushed to hide behind the wagon. _Mance told them to repeat the last lines,_ she thought.

He dropped his cloak on the ground between them and whispered, urgently, "Turn your back on me." And Sansa understood even less but she would do as she was told, reading a silent plea in his eyes. He was not Petyr and it felt safe to do as he said.

He stood too close to her. The space behind the wagon where they were fully hidden from prying eyes was very limited in size and the Hound seemed determined not to be seen.

Sansa turned her back on the Hound and he must have done the same. She heard a soft sound of strong arms struggling with something. A warm elbow accidentally prodded her back and she became painfully aware that her shoulders were covered only by a somewhat thinner travelling gown than the one she wore the day before, and that she hadn't donned her own cloak yet. Another elbow touched her at the waist level (or was it his bare back?) and she fought to stand still when she noticed a large black tunic forming a puddle on the floor, touching both his and her feet in a cramped space. Breeches were unlaced and when he lifted one leg from the ground to remove them, their backs collided, leaning into each other for a shortest moment.

The pile of fabric on the floor grew in size and Sansa noticed a decorative yellow border clearly visible on parts of the black garments. A black line was sewn through the yellow stretch, ending in a three headed dog. _The colours of his house,_ she thought, absent-minded, when he leaned into her back again, in an effort to collect his discarded garments without touching her, which only resulted in a longer moment of their backs being joined. The small patch of bare skin above the neckline of Sansa's dress tingled, and she caught herself wishing that her gown was even thinner, or that her back was bare as his must have been.

He was standing behind her only in his smallclothes, Sansa realized, groping for his tunic, which lay on the ground with the largest part sprawled before Sansa's feet, not making it easy for the Hound to catch it without being seen from the outside or toppling her over.

"Here," she said, moving the tunic towards him daintily with her left foot, not daring to bend over to pick it up, and feel his body again, regretting her choice at the same time. He gave a grunt and pulled at it but it would not budge. She realized that the reason for it was that she was standing on it with her other foot and when she moved, she met another wave of warmth passing from his back all along hers, gown notwithstanding.

Sansa imagined that her mother tied her and Sandor Clegane together, back to back, as she did with Ser Jaime and Lady Brienne and that they stood like that for hours, waiting to be rescued by some unknown people from distant lands. It was a silly thought and she hated herself for it, but it still lingered bright and clear in her mind, with no intention to leave.

She overheard Ser Jaime greeting Ser Daven Lannister and finally understood. The Hound didn't want to be recognised by the colours of his house by anyone, with the exception of Ser Jaime, whom he trusted for some reason. They spoke so freely the day before as her brothers Robb and Jon would have done long time ago when she still didn't dream about leaving Winterfell.

After their row the night before, Sansa spied on the Hound in the morning when she woke and she saw how he gave a clean set of his own monk's clothing to Lady Brienne. It made Sansa strangely happy to guess that the clothing he wore now must have been his own, maybe even the very same attire he had on under steel stained with blood and boiled leather, when he came to her room the night of the Blackwater battle: to save her, kiss her, or kill her, she had never been certain.

"Turn it inside out," he said matter-of-factly, waking her from her reverie by giving her back his tunic. She dared to glance back and realised that he was obeying his own command turning the breeches inside out. Sansa tried her best. Her hands were stiff and he leaned into her again when he bowed slightly and than straightened himself to put the breeches back on. She staggered towards more closeness when she finally managed to hand him back the tunic as he wanted it. And then she stood straight, alone... But all she could think about was how wonderful, wonderful it was...

His rasp came from the stage, obediently discussing the need for a king to uphold the laws with his father.

In a haze, she saw Blackwood approaching her and giving her his arm to enter the stage. She checked that her mask was on, though all knew now who she was. But she didn't want them to see her face, fearing that it may have looked vastly improper for a daughter of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn Stark. The mask felt friendly, and almost warm. She made a step forward on Lord Blackwood's arm, and another, and then another.

One more step was all that it took.

"Your Grace," Blackwood said and made a courtesy proper when addressing the king. Sansa followed suit, remembering the many times she sank to her knees in front of Joffrey to either avoid or better suffer his rage. "I thank you for the honour of allowing us in your presence, and for the opportunity to present you my only daughter, Lyanna."

"Lord Stark," Corbray spoke as if Blackwood was from Flea Bottom and not a great lord. "What brings you to Darry?"

Blackwood spoke evenly, occasionally repeating after Petyr, who was taking his prompter role seriously to Sansa's surprise.

Lord Rickard pretended not to notice a slight in Aerys' voice, when he managed a reply. "An invitation, Your Grace, for Lord Darry, to grace us with his presence in Riverrun. Before the great tourney in Harrenhall, my path leads me there to celebrate the betrothal of Brandon, my eldest son and heir, to Lady Catelyn Tully, and that of my dear daughter Lyanna to Lord Robert Baratheon.

"Father, so this is the wild rose of Winterfell!" a deep voice said, trying not to rasp, to avoid being recognised by that alone. "I heard of her when I travelled north, but we haven't had an honour of being properly presented, " the voice went on, familiar, not needing any help from Petyr to find his words. Sansa could tell from his tone that the corner of his mouth must have been twitching under his mask.

 _He always talked a lot to me,_ Sansa remembered, _even in the Red Keep._ The yellow borders were no longer visible on the clothing he now wore inside out, blacker than writing ink. The black opposed the whiteness of the mask, making his appearance polished and calm, the weirwood disguise firmly attached to its place, fastened with the same precision the Hound would use to strike his opponents down.

 _He talked to me a lot only because he was in his cups,_ she reminded herself of the whole truth, and was sad.

Blackwood pressed her arm and she realized Petyr was whispering what she was supposed to say next.

"Your Grace," Sansa made the required courtesy. "My prince," she repeated it and it was Corbray, no, the king, who motioned her to stand up. That was good because the Hound's presence behind the wagon had made her every bit as nervous as Aunt Lyanna must have been when she discovered who was the man that she had been foolish enough to meet on her own.

As many times before, Sansa took shelter in words others told her to recite, "I am honoured to bow before the rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms, before I travel to my future home in the south and adorn its halls with ice."

"There is no ice in Stormlands, my Lady," said the king. "A less benign sovereign could hear your words as treason! Do you northerners plan to conquer the south? Bring the ice on our homes? Is that what you're plotting?" the king's eyes glittered ominously as an afterthought.

"Forgive the candour of my daughter, Your Grace," said Lord Rickard, her father, flatly. "It is told of my Lyanna that her heart is made of ice like our lands in the North. She is merely toying with the common jape of the people. She is the Lady of Ice but she will be the most priceless possession of her future husband and grace his halls with her kindness."

"You imply your daughter has no understanding of her words," said the king, sounding suspicious.

"Women rarely do," retorted Lord Rickard.

"Is your heart truly made of ice, my lady?" asked the prince. _No, not the prince,_ Sansa thought. _He is not like Joffrey, he has never been._

 _"_ Fire can melt the ice, Your Grace," she said, carefully, and met a pair of grey eyes behind the red slits. They didn't seem angry any more, but what was in them, she could not tell.

"I hope then, for your sake, that your betrothed possesses that kind of fire," the prince commented lightly and the king laughed bawdily.

"I haven't met a man destined to become my betrothed yet," Lyanna responded as a proper lady. "My heart is still my own."

The prince almost tripped over his cloak, and Sansa wondered if that was what real Rhaegar did when her aunt defied him so.

"Beware, my lady," the king commented surreptitiously, "that your heart doesn't get stolen then, at the great tourney in Harrenhall, to the misfortune beyond measure of young Robert Baratheon."

"I fear not such a thing," Lyanna must have looked at Rhaegar then, silent and menacing in black, "for I buried it too deeply in my chest to be found."

The cries of approval filled the air, flying with the wind. People finished packing and came to watch as the scene unfolded. Ser Jaime Lannister spoke in loud voice, "By the Seven, Mance, how did you imagine all this, from so little history we know about them all?"

"Where I come from, the old gods speak to the bard in dreams," Mance said, and Sansa thought he was counting the host of Ser Daven as he spoke. "They guide our lute and our quill."

A man tied to a horse in the middle of Ser Daven's knights started jerking madly until some too kind soul among the soldiers removed a piece of wood stuck in his mouth and let him speak.

"That was marvellous!" he said to Mance with genuine approval. "Do you mind if I make my own song out of it for these lands?"

The newcomer's voice caused a very pale Gendry to push his head very slowly out of the wagon opening, where he was supposed to rest with the grievously hurt Elder Brother. "Tom!" he said.

"You know him?" Mance asked.

"He's Tom Sevenstrings, a singer, like you. He serves the Lady Stoneheart," said Gendry and several swords and knives in arms of men under Mance's command were aimed at Tom's chest.

"I swear I have no idea where her ladyship is! I was returning to the caves when the good sers here took me!"

Mance asked, and Sansa winced from the unexpected sharpness in his voice, wondering who he exactly was when he and Jon met: "Gendry, do you believe him?"

"No," Gendry said stubbornly, observing with satisfaction how the blades narrowed down at the second singer's throat. "But he can help you if you force him to."

"Speak plainly, boy," said the Hound, impatient.

"He knows the way from here to the High Heart. It's another place where the old gods used to have their wood. There lives a very old lady who might be able to help the Elder Brother, if anyone can help him at all."


	12. Luminous Trail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where fortune is told to some

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I own nothing.  
> Thank you for reading.

**Jaime**

"When were you going to tell me?" Jaime cornered Brienne just when they were all about to ride in the direction of a place called Heart, and a High one at that.

"Tell you what," she mumbled, avoiding to look at his face as if he was scarred worse than the Hound or had greyscale at best. Jaime was reminded how despite her awkwardness with people she never had any trouble observing his stump. _Unlike Cersei,_ he thought.

He grabbed her right arm with his only hand and shook her harsher than he intended to, with all his might, immediately letting her go and stepping back. "I'm so sorry, my lady," Jaime stuttered. "This was most unthoughtful."

Almost hitting a woman in a fit of temper shocked Jaime profoundly, even if she may have been stronger than him, the disabled knight, and preferred fighting in a melee to needlework. A sting in his chest made him remember the bruises on Cersei's immaculate face when Robert was particularly drunk and rude. Jaime couldn't, wouldn't possible sink that low, even if the desire to make her yield remained strong, simmering in the pit of his stomach. Why was it so important that she should give in to him, he did not know.

"You should have told _me_ about Ser Hyle and Pod and that they were the reason you betrayed me. Instead of keeping your sweet thick lips shut and let them sentence you to die with me as my whore in ungodly silence."

"What difference would it make?" Brienne managed to ask back, no doubt provoked by the return of his insolence. "We would both still die if the Elder Brother did not come."

"To me it would," Jaime said, unforgiving. "You could not allow two innocent people to be hanged. You brought me in for your stupid sense of honour."

"Thank you for the compliment, Lord Commander," Brienne spoke quietly, her voice rang empty, defeated.

"Wench," he said, wondering why his voice broke when he pronounced the word that has become his personal treasure. "You're as honourable as ever. I should have known."

"Brienne," she suggested, somewhat more courageous, as she mounted her horse.

Jaime wore armour again, since Daven's company brought his spare enameled white steel with them, as well as a very talkative Ser Hyle Hunt and young Podrick Payne, whom they had found in the woods. Hunt couldn't shut up about how he would've been hanged dead, as if he'd been an oath-breaking Frey and not an honest knight, if his future betrothed did not accept to bring the Kingslayer to the Lady Stoneheart to pay for his crimes.

The word betrothed shocked Jaime in parts of his being he didn't know existed. He almost had to tell himself aloud, and for all to hear, that Hunt didn't look like a bad match if Brienne wanted to marry. Other words, awful words, hateful words, plummeted from his gorge. He stopped at the last possible moment his tongue about to lash, clenching and unclenching slowly the hiltless Valyrian steel dagger the Hound let him keep. "The shiny metal is nothing to me, _"_ Sandor Clegane had commented. "Give it back to the Elder Brother when he wakes."

There was more to Sandor Clegane's scarce and impolite words, Jaime soon realized. The dagger, a masterpiece of smith's work, even without the gems it must have once worn on its handle, was forged to fit a different owner, one that must have been left-handed in battle and in letters, even if he still had use of both arms. As such it fitted Jaime's new condition better than any other weapon. _The bastard had always been smarter than we gave him credit for,_ Jaime thought about Clegane, _or he wouldn't have kept his head on his shoulders serving my sister and Joffrey for as long as he did. Maybe he needed to be that way from the very beginning, to survive his own fine household ran by the Mountain,_ Jaime realised, remembering an overgrown taciturn lad who sought service at the Rock when Jaime was little more than a boy himself.

When Jaime left with Brienne, and did not return, the Lannister soldiers sent fast flying ravens and regrouped. Cousin Daven led a search for him after a day, dividing the host in two. When he returned to Pennytree after a day and a night of unsuccessful tracking, it was only to learn of the adverse fate of the second part of his army, whose funeral pyre was still smouldering. They missed Lord Baelish and the monks by hours. Wanting to know more about the destiny that had befallen their fellow soldiers, and having lost all hope of finding their commander in life, they tracked Baelish south-east, and they too were followed by the evil and the cold in return. They camped two times at night in places that looked safe, and built large fires all around them, but every morning a dozen of men would be gone, including the boy Hos, Blackwood's son, and Jaime's young squires, Piper, Paege and Peck. Pia still rode with the men, and several widowed women from Pennytree joined them, some with children and kettle, so the number of camp followers had a steady chance to grow.

Podrick Payne learned about the fate his cousin, Ser Ilyn Payne, had suffered in Pennytree and had difficulties in accepting what happened. "He'd not want to go down like that," Pod had been repeating for half a day. "He was a King's Justice and all, but he was not such a bad man. He would've liked to go down protecting somebody. Doing his duty as an anointed knight."

All scouts they sent out when Daven found Jaime confirmed what the bare eye could see: the land was divided between the upcoming winter and still autumn. In the golden, orange, brown and lavishly red conquered parts of the modest woods and the broad fields of the Riverlands no grumkin doing had been seen. Men started to call that way the inexplicable evil waiting for them in the cold, since young Lady Stark had called it that way first, Jaime soon learned. Somehow it made it easier to face the unknown if you gave it a name that did not frighten you out or your wits. On the contrary, the winter plagued stretches of the lands looked sinister, with trees and bushes torn apart, as if a violent party of brigands stormed through them at night. They were suspiciously devoid of animals and living things, except for the distant howling of wolves which made the blood of the scouts run cold. What they could not begin to understand was if there was any reason why the winter touched some parts first, and missed other leagues of land in their entirety.

So Ser Daven and Ser Jaime, who have crossed the Riverlands back and forth in the war of the Five Kings, set out to trace the best way to the High Heart. The singer, Mance, had been evilly smirking to Tom Sevenstrings, honing his longsword very close to the unfortunate man, and arranging his peculiar furry-almost-white cloak as if it was his wife and not a piece of clothing. Mance let it slip in front of the rival singer that in all honesty he may have come from the island of Skagos where people ate human flesh. Jaime was nearly certain that Tom told them the truth about where High Heart lay, after listening to that particular tale.

The path was to follow the red and gold of autumn leaves. _Lannister crimson will lead us to safety if gods are good at least for a day,_ thought Jaime, observing the trees around him, before he repeated sheepishly after Brienne, as one waking up from a long chain of dark thoughts: "Brienne..."

"Honor is waiting for you," she told him pointing at his horse.

Jaime suddenly looked forward to a long exhausting ride. The last time he felt equally exhilarated was when he swore to Cersei that he would cherish her forever in the gardens of Casterly Rock. They were children, loved and blessed with easy life, and knew nothing of what life would bring.

But now, now... nothing had happened at all to feel accomplished about. Except that Brienne was still herself and Jaime's world was made whole. He could easily enough have faith again that the sun would rise in the east, and not in the west, without giving it a second thought.

**Sansa**

"Your mother must have been a very beautiful whore," Littlefinger told to a stunned Gendry on the wagon now reserved for the crippled and the ill. Young Robert Arryn rode a small horse next to Mance, and Ser Shadrich, little lord's sworn shield, was following close behind. Sansa was trying to keep pace with them, fighting to keep her dress properly down and avoiding the ponds of mud made by autumn rains whenever she could. The Hound was nowhere to be seen in a long human trail and it was maybe for the best for she was spared his words, which cut her deeply, and unsettled her most of all. She was going to think about him later, before falling asleep, as she did ever since they met again.

Gendry recovered from Petyr's statement and said, curtly, "A whore she might've been, no doubt a capable one. So were the mothers of many others."

"So innocent! A lesser man would be offended by your words, but I hear the ingenuity in them, aye. I only meant to say that if you inherited the looks only from your father's side, you would not make for such a pretty lad. Tall, strong, beautiful eyes, but with tender feelings as a pliable reed," Petyr's voice was laced with fake admiration and flattering.

"If you seek to hire a male whore, I am not interested," Gendry said with finality that seemed to have shocked Petyr, if only a little bit.

"My dear boy! I know establishments in King's Landing where they could propose you such an employment. And I would be glad to show you to them once we arrive, and the singer, Ser Mance, is quite done with you, as he will be, mind my word. But for now I merely alluded to the fact that you are the bastard son of the late King Robert Baratheon, as clearly as Tommen is now our true king."

"A bastard is a bastard and an orphan an orphan, it matters not who their father was," said Gendry with determination, not giving in to cruel mocking that came his way. "And unless you want to ring my bells free of charge, I beg you to stick your nose in business of m'lords and m'ladies of your standing and leave me be."

"Foul-mouthed as your father, I see, yet another proof of who you are," Littlefinger smiled knowingly.

"Not as my father, as anyone from Flea Bottom."

Sansa suppressed a gasp and finally understood why Gendry looked like late Lord Renly. Petyr observed the boy's face closely for a late reaction, as if he could not tell if the boy knew or suspected about his paternity from earlier. "When you have nowhere to go one day in King's Landing, remember I offered you a helpful hand. If you stay alive that long, that is. His Grace is young, but he may not take it kindly to see a face of his father walking down the Street of Steel again."

The boy looked aside, into the woods, as if he was waiting for someone, or something. "The inn," he said, after some time had passed. "Mance, ser!" he called out.

"What inn?" asked the uncouth man called for.

"Jeyne's. The inn at the crossroads. 'Tis in the lands we're passing now, just a bit over there, where there's winter already come. She had a little sister, Willow, I should like to look for her and take her with us."

Sansa joined the conversation: "Gendry," she said in a warm voice. "We should better not go there. You've seen what happens at night."

"You're lying," Gendry snapped at Sansa. "You lied before and than Arya's friend Mycah was killed. Chopped to pieces and given to his father in a bag."

Sansa's carefully rebuilt world started to spin and was about to crumble. She thanked the gods, the old and the new, that Petyr had already drifted into insignificant conversation with Sweetrobin and Ser Shadrich so hopefully he was not paying attention when Gendry mentioned Arya. _It would seem that she did survive the flight from King's Landing, at least,_ Sansa rejoiced with all her being but she did not let it show.

With her face immobile as a thick layer of ice, she faced Gendry, her eyesight hindered by unshed tears. She drew a finger over her mouth before she told him with the conviction she had used before, to address the Lady Stoneheart in the pit. "We are to read tonight when we make camp, or tomorrow, I believe. Ser Gendry of the Hollow Hill, it would please me greatly if you continue to read with us. With me. And discuss such matters as you just brought forth."

The courtesy did what Petyr's words could not. Gendry bowed slightly in acceptance and turned his pleading look back to the King-beyond-the-Wall who said: "Tomorrow in daylight I will look for Willow myself. But night is almost upon us and we will not do much good to anyone if we are all cold and dead." That seemed to have satisfied Gendry, who withdrew to the darkness of the wagon where he was supposed to rest.

xxxxxxxx

"Ride hard!" a scream came from behind. "Don't stop!"

And Sansa did not, but riding hard was difficult in her heavy skirts, on a rather tame horse she was otherwise glad to have. Riders passed by, and so did the wagon until she was among the last ones, the horseless and the unhorsed from Pennytree, the camp followers, the peasants and their cattle. A cold wind came behind them all, and a shrill of dead voices, calling to each other, or wishing to instil despair in the living. She turned to look back where the road wound away, dark blue and inviting. Something possessed her and she guided her horse in that direction, opposite from everyone else, as if there was something there she had to see. A ghost of her Father, her Lady Mother, or her septa, who could tell her how she should live her life and where to go once they reached the capital again.

Sansa was not afraid any more, as her younger self had been. She just didn't know what she was supposed to do.

She rode for an hour or more, until she was swallowed by the dark, and the sunset was no more. The autumn leaves were almost gone from the canopies of the trees. She had seen them then, not the bodies of those she lost, of those she missed dearly, but of unknown men and women, commoners, innocent people. She thought she saw a wight of one of the outlaws who'd been following Lady Stoneheart as well, the one who wielded a bow with arrows and whom the Hound nearly choked to death. The corpses stood on the other side of the seasons' divide and they could not cross.

A knowledge came upon her at that moment. _Nymeria will not help me here,_ she understood. _She helped me in the caves in the Vale when Petyr feasted on strongwine and wanted to rape me. Then he would have paid the High Septon to annul my marriage and said that I had lost my maidenhead because of riding, and not in bed to Tyrion. He dared laying his right arm on me and Nymeria came. She would have bitten it off if Ser Shadrich and the other sellswords did not arrive with torches and the clatter of swords._

 _Nymeria is not allowed in this place because she also is a being of the cold. And even if she was, she is too far away now, hunting near... Harrenhal?_ Sansa's knowledge of that felt final, stronger than her love for the golden prince Joffrey ever did back in King's Landing, when she still adored Joff and admired his mother, the queen.

 _We have to go to Harrenhal. Then, maybe, I will know my purpose,_ she concluded.

The dead approached her, bidding her to go with them, calling her name. She didn't answer the call, pausing to look at the last red leaf in the crown of the tree next to her, delicate and perfect, swaying in the breeze. Had she made another step forward, there would be no more leaves, and she would join the army of the dead as one of them, a creature like her Lady Mother has become, and just like her, not of her own choosing.

The leaf fluttered and started its fall, immaterial, weightless, unreal.

Sansa tried to turn her horse back as the dead closed in on her. The horse would not move, as if he were a land ploughing animal, and not a trained one at all. So she got off it and scurried backwards where she came from, lifting her skirts high, cursing herself for being silly and going against the tide. _I have to go to Harenhal,_ she thought as she ran faster, with her heart in her throat. She sensed or maybe she made it out in her fear that the cold fingers grabbed the hem of her long folds.

 _Gendry and Arya were together in Harrenhal,_ Sansa knew as well. It felt almost as if Nymeria summoned her to no man's land to convey her a message, if only direwolves could talk.

She saw the lights before they reached her, tongues of fire, torches, burning oil dripping. The crystals of snow, only a few feet away from where she was getting stranded and pulled back into the dark became, illuminated with unnatural glow. Five men rode towards her, but only four carried fire, the foremost was but a cloud of darkness, an image of Stranger came to take her in a righteous anger. She was swept off her feet and among the thunder of the hooves she could distinguish under the thick robes behind her back a steady beating of a man's heart.

"Your septa didn't teach you how to ride," a voice whispered, not angry, dark, deep, filled with sadness.

"I am a high lord's get, remember," she managed to say, nervously. "I learned how to ride, and I can do it. It doesn't mean that I like it."

"Then what got into you?" he had to know.

"I don't know," she said, sincerely. "Have you ever done anything you just had to do without knowing why you had to do it?"

"Once," he said and she felt cold, irregular, repulsive skin touching her neck where her dress ended under her riding cloak, just before the lips she had tasted in Raventree from under the mask sealed her skin with a cruel hurting kiss.

She instinctively touched her neck with her hand. It was empty, untouched, pristine, alone, despite all her senses telling her mind that he was still kissing her at that very moment. And she just couldn't believe she would find mere touch of the burned part of his face repulsive, especially when she could not see it. Even if she did find it ugly in the merciless light of the day revealing every ridge, and every red and wet looking cavity.

"You didn't kiss me the night of the Blackwater Bay!" she blurted.

"No," he confirmed in earnest, "but I sure as seven hells wanted to. Any men would."

"Please. Please, whatever it is on your mind now, do it. Exactly what is on your mind. I will not take offence, I swear, whatever it is," she pleaded and waited.

A trail of light was cut out before them, and extended far into darkness creeping behind them. Four riders carrying fire opened the way forward, dressed in red which marked them as Lannister soldiers, she supposed. The knights and their horses felled the darkness with the unknowing misplaced courage of the knights of summer. On the sides, framing a forest path they were all taking, a congregation of fireflies spread in straight line, paving their way, making it more obvious to follow than the kingsroad.

 _A luminous trail,_ Sansa thought and knew this was important, for later, but then rough _warm_ skin touched her neck, nuzzling it as a hurt animal. When she felt his kiss again, she reached with her hand and it collided with the good part of his face, the burned side buried somewhere in her hair. _This is real,_ she marvelled at her discovery. _Not a mummers' farce._

"It's not cold and repulsive if that is what _you_ think," she needed to clarify before letting herself feel fully what was being done to her. "It hurts, but not as you think, either."

He wanted to lift his head at that, but she steadied him with her hand and fought the girlish urge to close her eyes and imagine he was her own mystery knight. Instead she first chose to keep them open and then forced herself to look in front and follow the path of light lying ahead, until a ring of weirwood stumps became visible on a high hill above. Sandor Clegane didn't talk any more and Sansa lost count of a number of kisses raining upon her bare neck and clothed shoulders by the time they were about to join the rest of their party, and his lips finally had to part with her, for the time being.

There was no doubt left in Sansa's heart that the Hound loved her, just like he said in his fever, or at least came closer to that notion from the songs of her childhood than any other man she has ever met. That too was a thing in which she would need guidance of someone older and wiser, someone she could trust, to tell her what she should do, if anything. But all she had were hints, half-truths, hopes and her own foolishness, the tricks of bright light, and nothing more than that.

She thought of the fireflies, and for the first time that evening Sansa was terrified of what she might find in Harrenhal, a cursed place in the realm, of which no nice stories were told, and no songs were sung.

**Mance**

The old dwarf woman would not let them up the hill if Tom Sevenstrings wouldn't pay her a with a song, and he would not, not even when cold steel was pressed under his neck.

Mance regretted he was not from Skagos so he could not eat the man raw, chasing away the fleeting thought of even worse things men did to each other like an annoying raven. He stretched his head and noticed Baelish smirking and talking to both blond Lannisters, convinced that nothing good or useful was to come from that conversation. They could camp on the hill by force, but somehow the King-beyond-the-Wall didn't believe that the old woman would then cure the Elder Brother, which was the reason for their coming to the most special place he had seen so far south of the Wall.

The hill towered above a manse land, surrounded by a circle of thick weirwood stumps. The trees must have been majestic once. Their brothers in size still standing could only be found at rare places north of the Wall. They seemed to watch over the plains and award their protection to the grounds. The air smelled clean and healthy. The winter they were running away from was but a distant thought of someone else in a kingdom far, far away.

"Hey," he called upon the blond kneelers with his battlefield voice and immediately conquered their attention. "Sers, would someone help me lower the Elder Brother from the wagon? Maybe if she sees him, her witch's instincts to meddle with things will prevail!" There was no doubt in Mance's mind about what the woman was. He had seen her kind before.

"I will help you, ser," said the Lady of Tarth behind his back, and Mance felt that from her mouth the kneeler title did not offend him half as much it should. Somehow it was impossible to think that she could talk any other way. They laboured, but the unconscious monk was heavier than he looked when walking and talking, his great length and thinness an obstacle to move him without hurting his wound. The Kingslayer was with them in several long strides, leaving Daven to succumb to the Lord Protector's charms all alone. Soon he was followed by Blackwood who seemed to have a good heart hidden somewhere in his thick chest. Between the four of them they succeeded in laying the Elder Brother in front of the circle of dead wood and the fragile pale figure of an old stooped woman, whose eyes gently centred on Mance, sharp, red, a thousand years old.

 _She looks as if she had seen the Long Night,_ Mance thought, unease brewing in him when she addressed him, acknowledging the lute he bore for the first time. "You could sing too," she said greedily. "A song about this man you bring before me, if you please, for the delight of my old eyes and ears."

"It wounds me to tell you there are no songs about him," he replied and waited.

"Then about a prince who was promised, if you have heard of him in the north, of course."

"I am writing a play of late, " Mance proposed his bargain. "It is consuming my mind. I could show you a piece of that work, or sing something common like Dornishman's Wife, as you prefer."

The dwarf woman motioned them to bring the Elder Brother up the hill and the host followed in as they could. There would be not enough place on the top of the hill for everyone, but the whole area appeared to be sheltered by forces stronger than the cold. It felt as if no harm could befall them in the High Heart even if they slept under the open sky without the protection of fire.

Sansa and the Gravedigger where the last ones to arrive, and the black hellish horse found its way to the centre of the hill. The Gravedigger gave a nod to Jaime Lannister who had ordered four of his men to form a search party for the Lady Sansa: she could not keep up the pace when the scouts urged them to rush. Baelish looked less than pleased that she was back and positively furious that she was on a horseback with a man, septon or not.

Mance took in all that and turned back to the woman, overridden by a most unseemly urge to kneel in front of an insignificant old woods witch she appeared to be. He didn't do it, but she gave him a ghost of an all knowing smile. "You have seen things other men were lucky not to," she stated. "Aye," he replied. "Than your show will do for the payment of my favour for your friend."

She came closer and spoke quietly so that the others could not hear: "The first bit with the Sword of the Morning will do. I believe that is the next part you wanted to rehearse. Well met, I say, Mance Rayder, king by the choosing of your people, and against your own wishes in the matter. What do you want from me?"

The King-beyond-the-Wall grinned at the woman. He remembered other, long forgotten stories, telling she could be a descendant of the lost peoples of Westeros, a womanly child of the forest, one of the last remaining in life after thousands of years. The legends of the North said that the children's life span had been very long, but not even they could live forever, so they dwindled and died. Other tales said that when the Long Night comes and the white walkers wake, the children of the forest will rise again. But Mance learned not to trust a hope long ago. For only the bit of the white walkers waking had proven real enough in his world.

Nevertheless, he implored: "I ask for your protection, such as it may be, for me and my companions-"

"All of them?" she had to know.

"Aye," he released a word as he would an arrow, without thinking.

"Even for those who plot against your life as we speak?"

"It was my choice to let them come with me on my errand, all of them as the gods made them. Please, protect them all."

"It will be as you wish," she said, "now to your play!"

**Jaime**

"Ser Arthur, please, I have to speak to the Lady Lyanna Stark alone before she leaves for Riverrun, you have to help me."

"My prince, what you plot is high treason," observed Jaime Lannister holding a sword in his left hand, a fickle smile gracing his face at the thought of many unbearably sweet moments when he committed such treason himself with his own sister, the queen. "You know your father, the king."

"Precisely because I do know him better than most. Although I begin to suspect that only his pyromancers know all of his mind of late... She offended him today and she knows it not. I have to warn her. If I take a walk around the castle with my Kingsguard as a witness not even my father will be able to object. He commanded me to travel, to know my kingdoms and their keeps, so that I would not become a captive of any rebels as it happened to him in Duskendale."

"What of Princess Elia, your wife and future queen?" Jaime Lannister said, trying to make his voice sound worried, because such instruction came from the prompter behind. He still wasn't entirely sure why he was taking part in the aurochs' dropping of the play, if not for Clegane's most telling remark that the Elder Brother also did not have to save his golden ass.

"You know that I love Elia with all my heart," the courteous words sounded queer, even if not entirely unpleasing, in a huge man known for his ruthless tongue and even more implacable sword work. _The butcher we created and trained,_ Jaime thought, _my father Tywin and I._

"No," said Jaime, "I don't", pondering if Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, ever had such conversation with Prince Rhaegar. The truth of the matter was that Jaime didn't know. He was too young to be taken into confidence of his brothers in the Kingsguard. For him, addressing everyone by their proper titles had been the rule back then.

"Ser, I can and I will command you," the rasp was cold and serious as Jaime never heard it in the Hound he knew. _Then maybe I never knew him at all._ He wondered if his own voice would change as well, if he stayed in the idiocy of the play long enough.

"Rhaegar," he repeated after Baelish, wondering if Dayne had ever been truly allowed to call the prince they were both sworn to protect only by his first name, like between equals or friends. "How can we possibly hope to find a lady alone out of bed in the evening hours!"

"We walk as high as possible in this castle and we hope. Arthur, I have to try," was the last remark in the scene they had to perform, so that an ugly old woman would try and save the Elder Brother's life.

Jaime gave her a hopeful look when a red gleam from her eyes shot through him like a golden arrow, and he saw them listed and painfully bright in his head, all the dishonours to his name: helping father to end Tyrion's first marriage in a most cruel way, loving Cersei to the point of attempting to kill a child. His other sins, big and small, danced like mad before his eyes. The old woman's face changed shape and Jaime saw clearly the twisted features of King Aerys II Targaryen in the last days of his life, laughing merrily at him before dissolving into flames. And then, finally, the Mad King's face did not melt and burn, but turned into Jaime's own.

The Kingslayer staggered forward. The vision was gone and an old dwarf woman smiled warmly at the players.

"I will tell you of my dreams tomorrow when I dream them," she said and approached the Hound, daring to touch one of his strong arms. "Only for you, I have a warning now, lest I forget it by the morrow. Remember, and remember it well: What is dead may never die! Forget about that it becomes harder and stronger, that part is not for you."

If the Hound saw anything in the old woman's face, his calm demeanour did not let it show. And the Elder Brother's condition remained unchanged. Sprawled in front of the white tree stumps, he looked like a human sacrifice awaiting justice of a bloodthirsty god, not caring in the least about the woes of men.

Jaime wandered aimlessly to see if someone from the men under his command prepared his pallet or if he had to do it on his own. A brief thought of sharing it with a woman taller than himself crossed his mind, but he struck out and murdered it in his spirit before it could fall on fertile ground.


	13. The Crossroads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where different characters go different ways in the end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and special thanks to those who bothered to comment this silly work of mine.

**Sandor**

_Others take me,_ thought Sandor Clegane when he woke up and realized that what he did the night before had not been a haze brought upon him by Dornish sour.

It was nothing to him, to kiss a woman's neck. He was a man grown and had done much more than that. He'd always pitied the women whose lot was to lie with him for whatever reason so he'd very rarely kissed them. He would only submit a woman to _that_ when he would be too drunk or too angry to care. The Hound's rage was part of the legends in the Seven Kingdoms yet he was seldom _that_ angry.

Killing women was fine, when it was necessary, but rape was never his thing. That would be Gregor, Ser Gregor, not the Hound, never, never the second son.

He carefully lifted the bandage off his shoulder. The scarring was almost complete. _Trust the Elder Brother to fix me again,_ he thought, _and what for? To die in good health?_ He still put the soft tissue carefully back in its place, unable as ever to tell himself why he had always stubbornly clung to life.

 _It would be for the best if the boy died,_ the women in the keep whispered to the Maester, but since his father told everyone how his bedding had caught fire, the boy never seemed to do what the others expected. As much as he loathed his own face, he wasn't going to hide and he wasn't going to die. He'd hide from Gregor, a bit, so that he could survive and kill him one day and that was it. _Let them all watch,_ he had thought, _let them see,_ he'd say in his head, finding wicked pleasure in fear and disgust he sowed in his wake.

But that was then.

Covering his ugly face with a cloak, Sandor Clegane went to check on his latest master, and the very first one who had almost become his friend.

 _It was nothing to him_ , he had to remind himself when he got a good eyeful of her from afar, packing her scarce belongings, avoiding Littlefinger who was prancing around her like an overgrown foal, trying to make conversation.

The Hound soon reached the top of the hill where the ugly small woman stooped above the Elder Brother, but the bony monk did not look any more alive, or dead, than he did the day before. The Kingslayer and Daven already lurked nearby, victims of morbid curiosity, as far as he could guess.

The singer was probably still asleep, the Hound noticed with envy, jealous of the ability he observed in Mance, to sleep like a log in the most adverse of circumstances until the last possible moment, only to waken with the first real sign of danger, swift as a deer. Sandor Clegane knew rest, or what passed for it, only when dead drunk. It meant that he didn't sleep properly since he regained his wits on the Quiet Isle.

The Elder Brother tried to feed him calming herbs but none helped. He could simply bet whether he would experience the familiar nightmares featuring Gregor, or harm coming to his little bird by his sworn _brothers_ of the Kingsguard while he was forced to _watch,_ or if he would dream of an unknown vastness of sea and flames where his burned face was dipped in the fire again and again and again, and he could never stop burning. The Hound talked to the Elder Brother about the last dream because it was the only one he could describe without sacrificing his pride. The monk had seen it as a will of the Seven yet to be revealed, but the Hound found that their will was vague at best, or simply led to no good, no good at all, in the world as it was.

The new singer, a sorry bastard with a sweet face and a sickly sweet voice, probably supported by silly women for most of his miserable life, bowed before the dwarf woman as if she was about to foretell the future of the Seven Kingdoms in truth. Then, slowly, he reverently backed down the hill, disappearing from the Hound's sight. Sandor Clegane snorted at the undeserved respect she was awarded, thinking of the utmost foolishness she had shown by tossing at him as a kind of prophecy the words of the faith of the Drowned God, of the ironborn and the House Greyjoy. Every child in Westeros knew those. _Every child who could read_ , he corrected himself, _even a second son of a minor house like I._

"My dreams have been many and I cannot begin to tell them all. You," she pointed at Jaime, "have seen them and you will come back to me when you need to know more." The lion looked curious but did not reply.

Sansa approached slowly with Baelish in tow. Littlefinger wouldn't stop stalking her ever since she got off Stranger the night before, preventing Sandor Clegane to do exactly the same without causing undue attention. _He doesn't want to give a chance to an old septon to spoil his merchandise,_ thought the Hound. _As if there was anything left to spoil after the Imp._

 _You're not old,_ suggested the little frightened voice of a boy inside his head, but he dismissed it as a jug of water set next to wine on the tavern table. Kissing Sansa was still nothing to him when the ugly old woman started rambling, her eyes red like the slits around the bloody mask he now carried in his pocket.

"I have dreamed of a daughter of the river standing in the Great Sept of Baelor, receiving justice. And I have seen a kind young man with silver hair and purple eyes of a dragon kneeling before a dead maiden, and a new Queen of the Seven Kingdoms sailing home across the sea, a silver queen on a black beast spurting fire. But when the cold winds rise in the north, with my eyes open I dream of another who will come forth to call all the banners, those of the living, and those of the dead. The hidden to find the hidden. The reborn to stand against the tide. Lest the doom take us all, like the Valyria of old."

Sandor Clegane noticed the slightest tremble of Sansa's hands at the mention of the Great Sept of Baelor and a sinister forecast that a daughter of the river could be punished there for her crimes. _She believes in such nonsense, the little bird does,_ he thought and fought the urge to snatch her in front of everyone, load her on Stranger and ride with her far, far west, kissing her as they went. Though it was all nothing to him.

 _Might be that Gregor didn't ruin our father's keep completely before the viper prince did the world a favour to send him to seven hells_ , the Hound considered a possibility. Sansa's hair was down after a night's rest, even more coppery than when it shone in the firepit, or maybe it was a trick of his tired eyes, still getting used to the first light of the day.

 _You fool,_ he told himself, _Stranger is only a horse, he could not carry both of you that far._ He was acutely aware of the great risk he took the day before when he picked her from the ground riding fast, using one of his jousting tricks to unhorse the opponent. If the move was wrongly executed both contenders would hit the ground, and hit it hard. They could have landed together among wights and the things wouldn't have been pretty at all.

 _Yet you were victorious,_ the little voice said, _and she leaned into you just like the other day when you changed behind the wagon._ The Hound thought nothing of it, men changed on campaigns without a second thought, and he only asked her to turn around to spare her the sight of him and be done faster. But his sharpened senses of the warrior told him that even in the small space they shared there had been no absolute need for her to lean into him before he put his tunic back on. A vulgar thought that she may have wanted to feel a body of a bigger man after her marriage to the Imp crossed his mind, but it was not a believable one. If there was one thing he knew about himself, it was that he was no woman's dream.

The Hound forced himself to follow the matters at hand, willing his thoughts away. It was all nothing to him.

"Pray, what about this prince that was promised, were you the one who foretold to poor Aegon V Targaryen that this legendary saviour would ensue from the now extinct male line of his grandson Aerys, the second of his name, commonly known as the Mad King?" Littlefinger asked, amused.

"I cannot answer for all my dreams in the past," the woman replied as if she could not grasp the mockery in his voice. "But I have long dreamed about a bird who secretly clawed others to their death for years, to soothe the wounds of its heart. Until, somewhere on the way, its heart was lost. Dreams change, like life, unlike death. No one can be certain of what tomorrow will bring. And no one is smart enough."

"I am, in part, a daughter of the river," said Sansa in a tremulous voice. "Please, was it me in your dream?"

"Daughter," the old woman said avoiding the answer, "for you I have a parting gift: a set of stones given by the river, brought here for safe keeping before you were born. Take them with you. I dare say they would go well with your hair."

"Last time I accepted a token of stones, I was carrying death," Sansa dared a reply.

Littlefinger went pale like a corpse at Sansa's words. And Sandor Clegane took the mocking bird's expression and stored it in the corner of his mind where he guarded the deeds committed by more skilled killers than the Hound, those who did it without bloodying their hands. In that place Baelish was still holding a dagger at the throat of Ned Stark, and a younger Lord Tywin Lannister whistled joyfully the Rains of Castamere after the sack of King's Landing.

"Daughter, fear not. I am but an old foolish woman with her head full of odd dreams, who enjoyed your company and your play last night. Do not offend me by rejecting what little I have to give."

At that she produced a string of irregular dark red stones. Their shape was very roughly circular and they looked like murky glass, with their edges blunt as if the water had thousands of years time to erode all the sharpness and leave them perfectly smooth to the touch.

"Thank you," Sansa said, ever the polite lady, accepting the gift with grace. "If our singer was here, we could play some more for you. Ser Jaime, Brother Gravedigger, maybe we could read the next scene without him? Lord Baelish, would your help us, please? I believe you had the latest piece of parchment with you."

The Hound's legs took him forward against his will and the white mask found its way to his ruined face. For some reason it had always felt right on his features, since the first time he tried it on. It was all nothing, nothing to him: her blue eyes wide open staring in the distance when she let him devour her neck as much as he wanted to, before they unavoidably arrived at the High Heart and the moment was over.

Littlefinger's whispering reminded him he had a bloody role to play, a dragon prince, no less. His mouth twitched wildly but he still managed to speak: "I'd hoped to find you here, my lady."

"My prince," Sansa said in icy voice, which was not hers, but of a wolf girl long dead. "Is it a custom in the south for a man wed to play a foreign maiden for a fool?"

"Only when a man wed is but a fool himself," he replied, sinking into his role, determined to ignore who he was while the farce lasted. It was easier that way.

"I heard that honour had no value in the south, only base treachery. But I did not believe it until I discovered who you were," she spoke with resentment.

"My lady, I find that honour and treason go hand in hand in all the lands I have seen. And I may have travelled further and lived a bit longer than you did," Rhaegar had said to Lyanna with unfeigned kindness, on the highest wall of the Darry castle at night, the prompter muttered to all the players the circumstance of the scene. "Please, believe that I had not known who you were either."

"Had you known, would you have acted differently?" she continued her slash and parry.

"Would you?" he caught the blow of her question with one of his own, and that infuriated her further.

"Did you bring your friend to help you have your way with me? I will not go down meekly," Lyanna Stark warned the dragon prince, revealing a dagger in her hands, the prompter instructed from the back.

"Ser Arthur Dayne is Kingsguard, my lady. They always accompany the heir to the Iron Throne."

"Always?" she asked and backed off slightly, attempting to take her leave.

"Just like septas always escort the highborn ladies, the daughters of the high lords of the great houses, is that not so?" he called after her.

Ser Arthur's voice rang high and clear from the depths of time. "Please, stay, my lady. On the honour of the House Dayne. Your brother Brandon had been our dear guest a fortnight ago when I briefly visited Starfall. He bid me say hello to his little sister if I met her in the north. He is now on his way to Riverrun for the betrothal ceremony of the both of you."

"Thank you for your kind words, Ser Arthur," Lyanna acknowledged him but refused to look at Rhaegar. "I should now like to return to my rooms, as it is only proper for a maiden soon to be not only promised but formally betrothed."

"Lyanna," Rhaegar pleaded and she froze in her steps when she heard him pronounce her first name. "The way you spoke to my father today. Don't ever do it again. Please. Avoid him! Stay with your brothers, stay with your betrothed, keep your head down at the tourney in Harrenhal, Please, I beg this of you. Don't let him notice you ever again."

"King Aerys is Rhaegar's father. He knows him best, my lady," added the Sword of the Morning, his tone shrill and so sharp that it hurt, as the voice of reason often did.

"And if I so desire to fight in the tourney, what will you do? I can wield the lance and the sword as good as any of you," Lyana said full of mischief and bravery before Rhaegar could answer in all seriousness.

"If you do a foolish thing like that," he said, "my lady, I would have to match your deed with mine, and perform an outrage of such proportions that the Seven Kingdoms will talk about it for years to come. You may have wolf in your blood, but black fire stirs in mine, although its work is not plain for all to see. Think about it when you travel to Harrenhal. Stay safe, I beg you. Let me take my leave of you in peace, knowing that you will heed my warning, and I shall never bother you again for as long as we both live."

"Ser Arthur," she said, furtively, "do me this kindness and inform the heir to the Iron Throne that I will consider his words. It is all I can give him now."

A deep clear voice sliced the chill morning air from behind the players, the voice they hadn't heard since the firepit, the voice of the Elder Brother: "It would be fitting, now, if the prince kissed her hands in gratitude. I believe it was customary among Targaryens. But Dayne will take his leave first and the prince will then slightly overstep the boundaries of propriety, I think, and cover her arms with kisses from her wrists to her elbows. She will then run away from him and she should probably forget her dagger. Even a man's courage would falter somewhat in the end, when faced with the crown prince and his most renowned knight."

"I was assured that this play was innocent!" yelled the prompter for all to hear.

The Elder Brother was seated on the ground and he refuted the mocking bird, before it could protest any louder. "No, I beg to disagree, Lord Protector, this is still innocent enough, the arms are blessed by the Seven as a means of doing good in their name."

The Hound woke up from his role and did not think. He did not halt to rejoice because the Elder Brother was awake. He grabbed her hands before she could say anything, change her mind about playing with him, or just leave, and obeyed the order like a good dog. Her skin tasted sweet and he wondered if she would ever let him do such a thing as Sansa, when he would not be wearing the mask that spared her the contact with the ruin of his face.

 _But your face brushed hers and she allowed it, staying you with her hand,_ the voice said in his mind and the Hound wanted to hush it but he could not.

It was all nothing to him, to the little boy who had refused to die.

Yet as much as a man grown strove to stick to that belief, it evaded him, evaporating in the fluttering mist. Her hands were warm and moist, and her breath unsteady when he let her go. The Hound straightened up and gave her a long look.

Then and there, with the weirwood stumps as witnesses, he knew. He'd not lie to himself.

To kiss Sansa, it was everything.

**Brienne**

A great commotion in the camp brusquely ended the play, and any further recollections of dreams, past or present.

"The boy is gone!" the young monk came shouting. It was the one everyone started calling Benjen after the character he read in the play. The northern singer seemed to hate it, but there was nothing to be done when a name was picked up by the mouth of the people. After a short time in the new company even Brienne understood that he was not named that way by his mother. _I wonder what the men would call me if I read a part. Would they start calling me Nymeria if I played the role of the warrior queen? Would they forget the truth of what I am? The truth I had seen in the mirror since Septa Roelle taught me where to look for it?_

"The boy squire! And the ugly red-haired sellsword! And the singer which is not ours, the one they call Sevenstrings! Ser Lynn Corbray cannot find them and he's looking for the boy everywhere," Benjen was unstoppable.

"I saw them when they left," Brienne turned back to face the singer from the north speaking, climbing fast up the hill from the outskirts of the camp. It made her tear her gaze away from the mummers she'd been watching just like about everyone else until the yelling started.

"The boy went of his own accord," Mance said firmly.

"Lord Commander," Brienne turned again to listen to Lord Baelish addressing Ser Jaime. "You do not presume that this _bard_ knows more of the matter than an honourable knight from the Vale. The boy as the holy brother had called him is no other but young Lord Robert Arryn, son of late Lord Jon Arryn and his only heir. We were returning to the capital for the winter. We thought it would be safer. The Vale can be completely cut off from the rest of Westeros by the snows."

"And Lady Stark has also been traveling with you as I can see. How kind of you to help a ward of the crown return to the capital, Lord Baelish," said Jaime in a tone that would fool most people as serious, but Brienne knew it for a cruel taunt.

"Lysa granted Lady Sansa refuge in the Vale. I had no choice but to follow the will of my late lady wife in that matter. Although I let her know, before she met her tragic end, that the will of the King Tommen was above our own. I intend to seek his wisdom on what is to be done with Lady Sansa."

Brienne thought that she didn't even need to know Lord Baelish to be completely convinced of the falsity of his words. It was widely known he was a member of the small council and a master of coin for very long. Twisting the truth to fit the needs of running a kingdom must have been a requirement to serve the crown in such distinguished offices.

Jaime was an image of nobility and sweet courtesy, spoiled only by the prominent visibility of his stump in the bleak daylight, an essential piece of knighthood cut out and gone for good: "I am sure that you will do as you say, Lord Baelish, but it seems that now we have to organise a search party for young Lord Arryn, unless you sent him away on purpose with the sellsword. I propose to lead it myself."

"I could not presume to demand such a thing from you, Lord Commander, but I still thank you for your kindness," the master of coin sounded pleased.

"Not at all, my lord. Ser Daven will accompany you further south and I hope to join you again very soon. Should any trouble arise while I am gone, he will endeavour to assist you. Cousin, I will take five men, who know about tracking. And I was hoping that my lady would join us as well?"

Brienne turned toward Lady Sansa wondering why Jaime would take her on such a dangerous mission, back into the cold, but she was no longer there, so the only lady whom he could have addressed was herself. Even if she wore the title of the lady with the same grace as the gowns and the hairstyles that went with it in the south.

"My lord," she muttered. "In the light of our previous acquaintance, I don't think that would be wise."

"My lady, I do not require your wisdom, only your company. And you know these lands as well as I do if my memory serves me well. Or have you forgotten already how we travelled from Riverrun to King's Landing?" there was a hidden reproach in Jaime's voice.

Brienne looked into a pair of commanding green eyes and lost the nerve to go against their will, if only for a second. "My lord, the memory of our journey through these lands is indeed still fresh in my mind. If you will not be swayed in your opinion, then I will gladly help you."

"I intend to make it to Harrenhal, Lord Commander," Lord Baelish interrupted her as if she was too unimportant to be left to speak with her betters. "I would very much like to take possession of my new seat before continuing to the capital. I hear that some faithful soldiers of the crown are now guarding the place."

"Faithful is a most excellent word to describe Ser Bonifer Hasty and his men," said Jaime. "I wish my own faith in the Seven was as fervent as theirs. You will find no fault with their actions."

"Harrenhal is a cursed place," said the singer from the north, even if no one asked for his opinion. "We should head straight for the kingswood and for King's Landing while we still can. The winter is after us. Or have you all forgotten the terror of the cold?"

"And why would anyone take counsel from a vagabond minstrel, whose word means nothing in the Seven Kingdoms?" said Baelish, his practical face of a prompter replaced by one of vehement hatred.

"The minstrel brought you here from the Quiet Isle with your life intact. Or did your brave knights lead your defences in the woods, and later, in Pennytree?"

"My lords," said Lady Sansa who suddenly returned from wherever she had been. "Perhaps refreshing our supplies in Harrenhal would be of help. The war has not let many inns in business from here to King's Landing. We all need sustenance."

"Thank you, Alayne… I meant to say, my lady. This was also Lysa's idea, of course, to present Lady Sansa as my natural daughter in the Vale," Baelish spoke very fast and he appeared to be extremely satisfied with himself.

"Daven, you know my orders," Jaime said to his cousin, "Let's make haste to depart. The singer is right about the winter and we should find Lord Arryn as soon as we can. He may not last a night in the wild. Lord Baelish, where would the sellsword take him in your opinion?"

"Back to the Vale, my Lord. Alas, Lord Yohn Royce of the Runestone never took kindly to my marriage to Lysa and I suspect that he might want to seize Lord Arryn to rebel against me being the Lord Protector of the Vale, or perhaps even against His Grace King Tommen, as the traitor Robb Stark had done."

"An interesting theory," said Jaime, "I will question the sellsword about this before justice is served."

"Whatever you deem suitable, my Lord. He was in my service, but it seems that he has just taken his leave," said Baelish, calm as a statue.

"Until we meet again, then," said the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard and stepped fast down the hill, away from the ring of weirwoods and the protection it brought.

Brienne hurried to gather her things and one of the Lannister soldiers brought her a horse, a much better one than the animal she rode before. She recognised it for what it was, a gift from Jaime. It stirred the smouldering shame about leading him to his death, and made it burning hot again, even if she could not leave Ser Hyle and Podrick to die, she could not… She was startled by a tiny hand on her shoulder.

"Lady Brienne," Lady Sansa said softly. "You have sworn an oath to my lady mother to bring my sister Arya and me safely back to her."

"Well, it was Ser Jaime who-"

"-Forgive me if I do not put my faith in the Lannisters, even if I know too little about the Lord Commander in person to judge his true intentions. Please, Lady Brienne, when you go and look for Sweetrobin, could you do me a favour. Seek out the outlaws who captured you, those who followed Lady Stoneheart, and ask if there is one among them who witnessed when Gendry came to the Riverlands. Ask if he'd been travelling with a girl and what she looked like. Gendry just admitted to me that he was with Arya when those men caught them, but he doubts my love for my sister and refuses to tell me more. Please. I need to know if he's telling the truth.

"I sw-"

"Don't swear anything, my lady. Just do as you are bid. If you help me, I will not forget it. And I will be your friend, for what that is worth. My life may no longer be my own once I am back in the capital."

"As I will be yours, if you accept my friendship in return, unworthy as it may be of a great lady of your stature. Nothing would please me more," Brienne said with naïve sincerity men mocked her for, causing Sansa to offer her a small sad smile in return.

"One more thing, my lady," Sansa reached inside her travelling gown and presented Brienne with a sharp looking black pendant on a leather string. "Take this. You might find a use for it where you're headed. It's a talisman that belongs to the Elder Brother. Ser Jaime already borrowed his dagger and I believe you should have this until your return."

Sansa stepped up on a flat stone to be of a height with Brienne and tied the pendant around her neck. "If you meet a foe you have never encountered before," she said, "an enemy more terrible than you can imagine, use this before you waste precious time trying to fight it off with steel. Go now, with the blessing of the old gods and the new, and bring me tidings of my sister."

With that, Lady Sansa was gone as fast as a breeze or running water, and Brienne started to wonder if there was any truth to the stories that the Starks were only part human and part beasts, hunting in the woods of the north at night, wearing the skin and the body of a direwolf, but with sad human eyes. She supposed that in a world where an evil shadow of Stannis Baratheon could wander inside the camp full of armed men and kill his brother Renly in cold blood, anything was possible.

There was nothing left to do but to follow Jaime.

He had looked painfully handsome reading the short part of Ser Arthur Dayne. Brienne could imagine the Sword of the Morning exhaling the same air of quiet confidence as Jaime did, against the background of the dry white weirwoods and the pale blue sky.

A true knight ready to die for the king he was sworn to protect.


	14. Caught

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Jaime acts a true knight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Violence and gore, not as bad as in some previous chapters but still.
> 
> Thank you for reading

**Brienne**

"Ride west as fast as your horses can carry you," Jaime said to the men he took with them, supposedly for tracking. "Warn everyone, be it a highborn or a pig herder not to spare firewood for burning the corpses, and to stay in at night, next to fire. Let the old women remember the black stone, obsidian. It never had any use despite their pious bleating that the Seven endowed it with great powers. Now it may have. Whoever has it, best have it at hand, as a weapon. The time will show against what enemy."

"But my lord, ser," one of the man tried to object, "you told Ser Daven-"

"What I told Daven is no concern of yours. I can take on Ser Shadrich and a cowardly singer by myself, sword hand or not. I may yet slay the lying bard with his harp," Jaime said with coldness, remembering how Tom Sevenstrings was spying on his army, playing the Lannister songs, when Jaime addressed the small matter of bringing Riverrun back to the king's peace. He probably ran to what passed for Catelyn Stark since the Red Wedding, to report of the Kingslayer's latest crimes, as soon as he finished singing the Rains of Castamere. Failing to note a distinction that Jaime had only made threats, and not taken arms against the Tullys, honouring his word to Lady Catelyn.

"I wanted to go to Casterly Rock in person but I have seen it is my duty to return to the capital when we are done here, and someone has to go west. That someone are you. Now go! Before I change my mind and command you to hunt the white walkers in the mountain passes of the Vale."

Brienne didn't know what to make of Jaime's decision. They trotted alone from the High Heart back toward the weirwood caves buried deep in the riverlands where they nearly lost their lives, not seeing a sign of a living soul. The land looked only half alive, the daylight was dim and faint, the very air had a distinctly bluish hue. A bird cried in the distance, or perhaps a raven cawed, careless, announcing the end of the warm season, or of the time as they knew it.

"What are you up to?" she asked him, sick of pretending and lies, hers and his.

They could be honest to each other, they learned it after Harrenhal, they knew it before they reached King's Landing. They could do it again, if he truly didn't mind she betrayed him, which she still found extremely hard to believe.

"To spill out all my secrets to you, wench, I would have to be naked and nearing death in a bath tub, and the Bloody Mummers would have to take my other hand," said Jaime. "But I so prefer to guard all the limbs still in my possession. I am endeared to them."

"You want, and yet you don't want to go back to King's Landing," she guessed and hit her goal like an unpractised archer who accidentally feathered a moving target with deadly precision.

"There you have it," Jaime dismounted and walked forward, carefully examining traces of hooves on the half frozen soil. They may have belonged to Ser Shadrich, for all they knew.

"Or it may well be I just wanted some left hand sword practice with Brienne the Beauty, away from prying eyes. Lord Baelish would not let me talk to you so we had to take our leave!" he grinned so hard that the corners of his mouth curled upward in utmost amusement. "You'd make a much more pleasing training partner than the late Ser Ilyn Payne."

His last words were swallowed by the ground, as was he, easy smile and lithe body.

Honor whinnied in acknowledgment of the disappearance of his master and moved sideways towards a patch of still green, only slightly yellow grass, its persistent growth refusing to admit that the winter was well on its way.

Brienne had the presence of the mind to dismount before running after Jaime. She could glimpse an immobile shape at the bottom of a rather deep dark tunnel, some fifteen feet under ground. _Pits,_ she thought distractedly, _that is our destiny. Jaime's and mine._ She almost expected to see a bear inside. The sides of the passage were slanted, but rather steep and smooth, so Jaime must have rolled down very fast. Only the Seven could see clearly what was down there and how he fared.

"My lord, are you hurt?" Brienne called into the darkness, which did not speak.

"Can you hear me?" she called out louder.

"Jaime!" Brienne screeched, her voice a long wail carried forward by the wind, all propriety and titles gone to dust.

"Brienne..." a familiar voice mocked her from the deep, and she recalled the exact manner of his eyes flashing green as he did so. "You finally remembered my name."

**Mance**

The first day of the ride to Harrenhal was unremarkable, and it made Mance happy. The players didn't rehearse nearly enough from all the trouble they ran into, and the capital was drawing closer with every step they made. It would take them at least two days to arrive to the cursed fortress of the Whents, providing that the blessing of the ghost of the High Heart was indeed with them and no monsters would hinder them on their way.

Mance had a black premonition about staying in Harrenhal. He clutched and readjusted his cloak over his broad bony shoulders trying to find strength in it, furtively asking the old gods for counsel where human wisdom failed. They crossed one of the many streams that day, and used it as a line of defence around the camp, enhancing its borders with a low fence of chopped wood and fallen sticks alike. Fires blazed behind it at regular spaces, rekindled at times by the guards on duty. Outside the perimeter the creek hummed merrily, in a blind hurry to reach the mighty Trident they had left far behind on their travels.

"I will not do it," Gendry said. "You told me you would go and look for Willow. You lied. Why should I help you _make coin_?"

"I sent Benjen after the search party. He is sneaky enough for a monk. If Lannister can find Ser Shadrich, he can find Willow. I even gave him my horse!" Mance greatly regretted parting with the strong brown beast that brought him out of Winterfell in circumstances he would never forget, but it was a necessary evil. He had called it Patience, to honour the new virtue he had learned during his predicament at the hands of the Boltons, father and son.

"I will not," Gendry repeated.

"The boy has sense," said Baelish, seated as close to Lady Stark as the propriety allowed, after Mance helped him to set the wagon for the night and generously tended the horses pulling it. None of the soldiers would do it for him, despite his asking. "We should cease this folly. Best go your way, singer, if you are in need of haste. The Lannister soldiers will see the rest of us safely to Harrenhal and further south."

Unexpected help came from Lady Stark and Mance admired Jon's sister for her quiet grace.

"Lord Baelish," she said with poise, "if I should disclose to Ser Daven your arrangement concerning my marriage to a new Targaryen pretender as opposed to my undying wish to return to the court of His Grace King Tommen as a ward of the crown, he may not be pleased."

"As if he would believe you. You can fancy yourself a player, but you've never been more than a pawn," Baelish dismissed her words.

Mance wondered what the words player and pawn meant to the southerners. The world he came from had trees, and more trees, frozen lakes and valleys, icicles and snow. Men plotted, and killed each other for gains, but the words to name it all where much simpler than the elaborate style the kneelers used to convey their own cruelty to each other without using sharp steel, stone or bone.

Lady Stark looked diminished and uncertain. But then she straightened the folds of her heavy travelling gown and stood up, searching with her calm blue gaze for the tangle of blonde curves owned by Ser Daven Lannister.

"I'll do it," said Gendry all of a sudden.

"Why now?" Mance asked, coming to the conclusion that he sometimes didn't understand people at all, despite having celebrated a fine share of name days already.

"Because he doesn't want us to," he pointed at Baelish. "And I like him less than I like you. It's a good enough reason for me."

"Wonderful," said the King-beyond-the-Wall, caressing the pommel of his longsword. The weapon was idle for more than a day and it was almost too much to hope that it would remain that way for a while longer. "If you please, Lady Stark, you have just been left alone for the first time with your husband to be after the ceremony of betrothal. I don't sing about the crowds in my show because we have no means to render the weddings and the great battles as they were. And also because I find that the most important things more often than not happen between people."

"Shouldn't there be a tourney, in Harrenhal?" Sansa wanted to know.

"Indeed, we will have to include some of that, and also a part of the battle on the Trident and another, less known but no less remarkable fight in Dorne, that happens at the very end of my tale. But let's think about scaling the Wall when we come close to it. Gendry, you begin. Think of Lady Sansa as a girl you would have chosen as your bride and you'll do fine."

Gendry stood in front of the wagon and measured Sansa. Their eyes were almost at a level but the boy's shoulders were much broader, and his face still too pale from the loss of blood, giving a haunted look to his dark blue eyes. Mance was certain that Gendry did not find in Sansa what he was looking for in women, but he still spoke bravely, as if the image of whatever girl he had in his mind illuminated his being like a candle, so that he would never walk in the darkness again.

"My lady, all the Seven Kingdoms speak of your beauty," said Robert Baratheon to Lyanna Stark. "But you are so much more than anyone could have told me."

"I ask of you, my lady, to give me a chance in all honesty, to earn your love. I would want nothing more in this world. For you I would abandon my titles and my lands. I would drown my hammer in the moat under the gates of Riverrun and be rid of it. I would sacrifice anything you ask of me if only I could hope that one day I could win your heart."

"My lord," Lyanna Stark answered with caution. "Your words are all well chosen and knightly, and pleading with fair maidens is fashionable these days. Never flatter me, never lie to me, and I may give you a chance you are asking for. But I cannot promise you my heart, for it beats wild in my chest and it has been sworn to freedom."

"I promise you, Lyanna," Robert said, "I will be truthful to you as no man has been to a woman. And I would give away my freedom so that you could keep yours."

"I will try to grant you the favour you seek, my lord, an opportunity to earn my love," Lyanna said. "Yet the only promise I can give you now is that I will uphold the honour of both your name and mine. So that no one can ever say, no matter what will come to pass, that the Lady Lyanna has brought any dishonour to the House Stark."

"Thank you, m'lady," Gendry finished reading, betraying his low upbringing in the last phrase. He blushed like a girl, when he was told to kiss Sansa's cheek in the end.

"Do you have more masks?" Sansa asked.

"No," Mance told her. "The others will have to play with the faces the gods gave them. Go ahead, my lady, you speak alone when he takes his leave of you.

And it was as if Lyanna Stark spoke again from the abyss of time, calm as a messenger of doom:

"Why, oh why does the freedom come at such a terrible price? When my father made me a match, I judged the man I have never seen based on the opinion of others, I who swore not to care about their opinion of me. I decided to hate my betrothed for his many sins people said he had committed. As I would have probably hated any man my father chose for me, because I would not accept the woman's lot in life. The undeserved burden, to be humble, to please, to do the bidding of others, seemingly with no will of her own.

Lord Robert Baratheon has never had an honest chance to win my heart, before we even met, for I was not willing to give it to anyone. But how could I ever tell him that? I met him and I am ashamed. For he is clearly nothing like the stories of him. He is young and fearless, and honest above all. Even if he did visit brothels with my brother Ned, they both seem more innocent than I am in matters of love.

For in my chase for freedom, I was caught. I was trapped. I judged myself above the weak feelings of the women, sighing after the brave knights that only exist in stories. The body, the senses, they betray you, people say. But much more treacherous is the wantonness of the mind, always yearning for something we cannot hope to have. It used to be freedom, for me. But now that I have met Lord Robert, his innocence has opened my eyes, blinded by the folly of thinking myself stronger and better than the others.

My heart has already been stolen away from me, without me being the wiser for it, and I cannot get it back. I do not want it back. Although I can never hope to have what my heart truly desires.

The gods have punished my pride.

And I wonder if they have made anyone strong enough to resist love."

"That was a magnificent rendering of your aunt, Lady Sansa," the Elder Brother said with respect. He returned to watch the reading with the Brother Gravedigger, after giving the seven blessings to all soldiers in the camp, no matter to whom they owed their allegiance. Mance realized that the manner in which the Brother Gravedigger persistently followed the Elder Brother reminded him of two men insignificant in appearance, who trod after a overly proud kneeler called Stannis wherever he went. It was back at the Wall when Mance Rayder had almost been burnt alive to please R'hllor. Jon told him that they were the King's sworn shields. Even if Stannis was king as much as Mance had been, and maybe even less. In any case, the tall rude monk was cutting a much better figure of a shield than the men serving Stannis, when he would be tirelessly strolling up and about the camp, like a walking boulder protecting his charge's skinny back.

"Lady Lyanna would not say the words better herself. Although we should never doubt the greatness of the gods as the singer made us think with his tale," admonished the Elder Brother.

Mance had to intervene: "Oh, I do not doubt their greatness. Only our ability to see it in the world."

"I didn't take you for a believer," commented the Gravedigger maliciously.

"'You were right. I am not one," said the King-beyond-the-Wall, unconsciously stroking his cloak. "I wonder what Robert Baratheon believed in, later on. He was a very unfortunate man."

"He was?" Gendry and Sansa asked together, Sansa with pure disbelief and Gendry with hidden hope that the late king of stags, known for drunkenness and debauchery, may have been a good man.

"As far as I know his story, Robert was merely too late to meet Lyanna. It was the year of false spring and the snows melted too slowly in the Vale where he was fostered. So he couldn't travel north to meet her when their parents arranged their marriage. If he met Lyanna before Rhaegar did, then perhaps Westeros would not be as we know it today," Mance said, and didn't regret a single bit that Rhaegar and Lyanna had died. For if they did not, he would never have become Jon's friend.

"Arrived too late?" the Gravedigger asked in a deep voice, suddenly concerned, as if Robert's failure was his own.

"Life is all wrong, brother," said Mance, forcing himself to forget the lively faces of the spearwives that had followed him to Winterfell. "We are so often simply at the wrong place at the wrong time."

**Sansa**

Sansa walked out through the palisade and sat under a weeping willow next to the tiny river, thinking of Aunt Lyanna. The more she thought about her, the more she started viewing her aunt as if Lyanna had been both Sansa and Arya in one person, with their virtues and their weaknesses, a courteous lady and a sword fighter. _No,_ she remembered, _not a sword. Aunt Lyanna wielded a lance._

She looked around waiting for the Hound to come after her, unprepared for what she was going to say. The words like, " _I went outside the camp because I know you think it's not safe so you will follow me",_ or plain, " _I wanted to see you",_ did not sound good enough, and she was afraid they would make him angry. To say, " _We didn't read together today and I missed you_ ," sounded like an even more dangerous and slippery thing to say to him.

Yet she needed to see him, for no reason at all, and she was fairly certain that Petyr would not risk his skin by stepping outside the meager protection of the fire. So they might be able to have some peace.

Sansa was certain that no danger crept behind them that night, which smelled like the last breath of summer where they were camped. She could almost not wear a cloak and be comfortable. The grass was still green and small flies were buzzing over the water. Even a bird could be seen in the top of the willow, nestling free as Sansa was never going to be. It was not her lot. _Not a woman's lot_ , she concluded, thinking of Aunt Lyanna again.

He did not tardy in pushing his large body through the small path, cracking the dry branches as he went.

And then the correct words came to her as soon as she saw him.

"Yes, I would let you kiss my hands without you wearing the mask. If that was what you had in mind yesterday," she said, offering him both her hands up high, her eyes looking down, not at him, never at him, waiting for a rude answer that was bound to come.

A curtain of lank black hair fell all over her forearms and his breath was so much warmer than when he wore a mask. She could see a missing ear and the burnt half of his face from a completely new angle, the naked truth of things that happened in life. Sansa inhaled the fading scent of the long summer, and involuntarily closed her eyes.

And opened them again because his lips traced a path to her elbows, and with her eyes closed all she could do was dream about how it would feel if he would lift her off the ground and kiss her as he did in Raventree, full on her lips, with no masks between them. She refused to acknowledge such thoughts because she still didn't know what he was to her and what she was supposed to do. And she needed some time to find out, without anyone telling her what that was.

"Sit with me," she said, willing her voice strong like Lyanna's. "The air is warm and it smells lovely. This could be the last moment of summer before the spring comes again."

"I thought you liked winter in your desolate lands," the mocking came but it didn't cut as sharp as usual, because his bulky figure sank down next to her in the damp grass, observing the water flowing as if it was the most interesting sight in the Seven Kingdoms.

"We say it's coming. We don't cry for it to come faster," she said and tossed a pebble into the stream like a little girl, swallowing a giggle in her mouth for he could get her joy all wrong, as was his wont.

"Shall I fetch someone pretty to keep you company? A knight of summer for the summer night," his voice reached the habitual levels of cruelty without being fuelled by wine.

"King Robert told my father to get me a dog when he made him kill my wolf. He said I was going to be happier for it," she said without thinking. "It's just that my father didn't live long enough to get me one."

"I can get you the blind dog from the wagon as well, a tough beast, that one," he offered, refusing to understand her meaning, as if she spoke Braavosi and not the Common Tongue.

 _Would that I was a pebble_ , she thought, _then no one would tell me what to do._ She wondered if that was how Aunt Lyanna had also felt.

But when Sandor Clegane told her what to do, it never felt half as bad as when the other people did. Not when she had been a hostage of Queen Cersei in the Red Keep. When she didn't deign him with an answer regarding the dog, he luckily did not make any new suggestions, and he didn't leave either.

Sansa followed his lead and stared at the restless course of water, grateful for a moment shared, curious about what was to come.

**Brienne**

A skinny body pushed Brienne from behind and she slid with her unexpected attacker down the narrow passage under the ground, landing almost on top of Jaime, stopping her movement just on time. The newcomer was not so careful. He bounced further and fell squarely on the chest of the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, causing Brienne to stand up in rage and yank him off, discovering as she did it that she, at least, had not been hurt by the fall.

"Jaime," she called again, touching his shoulder armour.

"I'm glad that our friend here had the delicacy to push you in," Jaime said, "so that I can get back to my role of the saviour of innocent maidens. It wouldn't be fair to be rescued by one, would it?"

"Forgive me, m'lord, m'lady," interrupted the third man, "I am a brother of the Seven looking for a girl name Willow. I believe we can go faster back across this land, using these tunnels. They should all lead to the outlaws' caverns where you were held and further out to the inn. The inn where Willow worked with her late sister Jeyne. Not far away at all and 'tis the only one in these lands. Ser Shadrich will have to eat and sleep somewhere with the child he took."

"He's right," said Brienne. "I've been in that inn. That's where they patched my cheek before Lady Stoneheart decided to hang me."

An arm caught her for support, in an attempt to rise. A left one, for sure.

"My lady, my ankle suffered in this little incident. I will need help walking."

"Get rid of your precious armour, m'lord. No one will steal it here," counselled the monk. "It will not serve if we have to drag you and it will only slow us down."

Jaime started awkwardly peeling away his white armour without complaining. Brienne and the tiny monk worked with him to do it faster, and to save him the embarrassment. When they were done, the monk lit a candle, making the passage in the wilderness smell like a sept. Silent, he led the way forward, sure-footed like a shadowcat. Brienne pulled Jaime up, and held him fast around his middle, while his left arm hung loose across her shoulders for support. _I could carry him_ , she thought and laughed inwardly. _Yes, and then anybody who'd see us advancing in this gloom would think of me as a man and Jaime as a maiden fair._

Except that his body was as strong as her own and where his velvety red tunic touched her coarse brown one, the colours and the textures of the fabric melted together like two pieces of the same garment in the fragile candlelight.

The walk was not that long. The monk guided them alongside the grand opening in the caverns with the weirwood throne, avoiding to enter the hollow space around it. It had a look of menace to it when it was empty of the crowd. No fire burned in the pit. Brienne unconsciously pulled Jaime very close to herself as if she wanted to protect him from it now, although there was no real threat at all.

"Brienne," he said at that, hoarsely, and she blushed realizing what she did, "you may be a true knight, but they're also made of flesh and blood. As am I to my great misfortune."

Brienne didn't quite get the meaning of his latest taunt, and by his tone she wasn't sure that she wanted to, when a widening in the tunnel suddenly revealed a tree, then a yard, and finally a familiar shape of an inn built of wood and rough masonry. They walked for another minute under the evening sky, finding shelter in the growth around the building, until there was no place left to hide.

Opening their eyes wide, the three of them walked into the clearing and saw them all.

Ser Shadrich climbed up high in a tree, one of the oldest and the thickest he could find, more gnarled than his aged freckled face. The branch he held on to was shaking with his fear, and the air below it carried a peculiar scent, as if he may have done something in his breeches and not only of the liquid kind.

The boy dressed as a lord's squire, a proper little lord in truth, stood fearless in the middle of the clearing. He threatened the invisible enemy with a child sword drawn forward, small and probably not sharp at all. Young Lord Robert Arryn drooled from the left corner of his mouth and one of his eyes was running in the opposite direction from another. Had it not been for the bravery in his stance, Brienne's heart would have been moved with pity. Behind his back, he held firmly with his free skinny arm a mousy dirty girl, an orphan and a commoner, a head shorter than himself. The only thing the children had in common was a colour of their hair, dark brown, grown too long to be considered proper, and completely unkempt.

"I am a falcon," the little lord said with conviction, wiping the foam from his mouth. "I swore a solemn vow to protect the women and the children."

The door of the inn was shut behind them both, out of their reach, and the two fires were burning high on its flanks, illuminating the other worldly beauty of the night, glowing in the brilliance of freshly fallen snow. _A good night to die in peace,_ Brienne thought for no reason at all.

"Look," Jaime whispered as the monk cautiously blew the candle out. The children did not see them, but the enemy did.

There were only three of them facing young Lord Arryn and they were once men. One was the archer who shot the Elder Brother and the other two looked like common thieves. Their eyes shone blue in the dark, not the Tully blue of Lady Catelyn and Lady Sansa, or the sunny blue of the waters of Tarth. Their eyes had the deadly colour of ice and they were unforgiving. Brienne noticed that the archer also had an imprint of the noose on his bare neck. _So the good people here had the sense to hang him after all,_ she thought, not approving of what they did. But her thought sounded insolent like Jaime's, and she wondered what else she was going to become if she stayed for too long in his presence.

An arrow flew in her direction and she ducked, pushing the monk out of harm's way as well. _The archer has less precision when dead,_ she thought grimly, unsheathing her sword. The monk carried a peasant axe and stood his ground when the brigands stormed upon them. She cut an arm but she could swear it reattached itself. She parried and sliced for what could have been hours or mere minutes, but the enemy was still there. And Jaime was not.

Jaime!

The alarm sounded in her head when she saw the corpses attacking her burning, burning, burning... Returning to the Stranger as the dead should.

The bony monk wiped his sweaty brow in the light of the fire. A pair of green eyes beneath the flaming corpses tossed a large burning branch far away, jumping on one leg. The dark green pupils moved forward to reach Brienne, and then they closed, and lost balance, falling quietly in the softness of the snow.

Little Lord Arryn came to her, holding a hand of a girl child.

"Is he a knight?" he asked. "He saved us all. That's what the knights do. He rolled himself in snow to reach the fire. They didn't see him."

"He is," she confirmed, lowering herself next to Jaime.

Brienne laid him on the monk's cloak that the servant of the Seven generously provided, despite shivering in his breeches in the knee-deep snow. It was too small for Jaime but it would have to do. His eyes remained closed, but he was breathing steadily and he seemed unharmed. _He will wake up, he has to, it must be only the cold that made him weak,_ she told herself and observed him. The smooth red velvet of the tunic was scorched in many places, the left forearm and the chest under his neck singed in such a way that no blond hairs grew on those places. She opened the tunic further and pulled his left sleeve up, only to see that the golden procession of curls continued under it, and there were no wounds to be seen. _As if he crawled into the fire and not only towards it. He could have gotten burnt, he was lucky,_ she thought.

Brienne didn't know what to do when the boy spoke.

"She is Willow. She didn't have time to go in with the others. She came home after the dark. And her sister wouldn't let me and Ser Shadrich sleep in the inn. The rich were not welcome among the orphans, she told me. And I am also an orphan, I told her, but she wouldn't listen to me."

"You were valiant, my lord. And your father will be happy to see you unharmed."

"He is _not_ my father. I want Alayne back! But she is Sansa now, and she's my cousin, so I cannot marry her," the boy started to pout and Brienne who was at a loss what to do. Women like her were surely not meant to deal with children.

"Willow," Brienne said, "would your sister let us in for the night, please? Ser Jaime needs warmth and there may be more dead things in the wood."

At her words Ser Shadrich almost fell from the tree, hurling curses at the bloody winter, wights and the ladies who should birth suckling babes instead of being knights too stupid for their own good, when the door of the inn opened with a rattle.

Brienne gripped the black stone pendant around her neck, and faced the girl with the long raven black hair standing at the door. The noose had been around her neck as well, and she had been dead for awhile.


	15. To Court a Woman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where some characters sleep in an inn because that is what people do in Westeros

**Brienne**

Brienne left Jaime spread on the deep layer of crispy new snow, crimson on white, like an oddly shaped stain of not so fresh blood made on a clean bedding.

She advanced towards the monster, sword in hand, obsidian pendant ready in her left hand. The dead girl who nursed Brienne back into health once, if only to prepare her for the hanging, did not move, but her sister did.

"M'lady, don't hurt Jeyne," Willow said, waddling towards Brienne as only a child could. "She cared for us. Kept us safe from others like her, please, m'lady."

The thing that was Jeyne gurgled and Brienne's blood boiled, remembering Lady Stoneheart when her ladyship commanded Jaime's death. Completely forgetting how her own death had also been ordered then.

Willow glanced at her sister. "No, sister, we can't send them away," she said. "The dead would get me if the blond m'lord walking on one leg didn't burn them all. We should thank them."

Jeyne made a step backwards and opened the door of the inn, gesturing towards the tree where Ser Shadrich was glowing blue from fear.

"M'lady, " Willow said, "you can come in with your men, but the ugly one in the tree cannot. If he sleeps up there, the other dead ones won't get to him, so says Jeyne."

Young Robert Arryn, full of sorrow, dropped his practice sword in the snow and started walking towards the oak where Ser Shadrich was perched. Jeyne screeched, Brienne advanced with her sword and Willow winced but she didn't lose her nerve to speak, this time to the sad boy.

"Where're you going?"

"I am a squire of the ugly one, my lady," said Robert Arryn to an embarrassed peasant girl who straightened her skirt, to look more like the lady she was just called upon to be. "I will obey your lady sister's wishes."

"I thought you were a falcon," Willow said before turning back to her sister. "Jeyne, he was the first one who wanted to save me."

The dead girl made another step back in and motioned them all to come inside.

"Willow," Brienne said calmly, not losing a grip on her weapon, "Gendry sent us to find you. Come with us! We will take you to him."

"Only if Jeyne can come too," the girl said without thinking twice.

"M'lady," said Benjen, the monk, "he's getting colder, the Kingslayer is. Might be we should go in. Could be more dead things crawling out of the woods. And talk about who goes where later."

"A dead thing is right there!" Brienne said without courtesy. She was interrupted by a nervous rippling of a once girlish voice directed to the inside of the hut, barking a non understandable command to someone else who had been hiding in there.

"My lady," said a cultivated voice, and a lad all dressed in wrinkled Lannister silks, crimson and gold, peeped from the door. He shivered from cold when he spoke. "My name is Josmyn, of House Peckledon. I am Ser Jaime's squire. The thing you call dead has saved us in the woods from others more dead than herself, and fed us in here for two days. She said it was not safe to go after the army left us. Here's also Paege and Piper and Blackwood, son of Lord Blackwood. And another boy that was with them outlaws, Edric Dayne. He'd been looking for Willow, but he couldn't find her until the ugly knight and his squire brought her here. She wandered away crying when Lady Stoneheart hanged Jeyne."

Brienne did not know what to think. The forest looked uninviting and bleak, the chill in the air oppressive and deadly. But the inn didn't look a single bit more inviting or safe. Young Lord Arryn made a decision for them all, when he returned towards Willow and bowed before her as though she were a great lady and he a hedge knight unworthy of her favour, and not the only living son and heir of one of the Great Houses of Westeros.

"Thank you for your hospitality, my lady," he said and walked to the inn door, entering with courage only a child can possess when it doesn't understand the extent of the danger. Willow looked at Brienne with huge dark eyes.

"Please, m'lady, for your friend, do not stay out, the other living dead are not far. The tunnel you used to come here is theirs by night. They fear the heart tree but not much else in the dark."

"Willow, you speak well for one so young," Brienne said.

"Gendry learned in King's Landing and taught us," she said. "He wanted to speak proper, to please a lady. But she didn't want him and she left."

"Which lady?" Brienne asked, remembering Sansa's bidding.

"It was only a girl, a bit older than me, and a bit younger than Jeyne," Willow said with dislike. "But she just accused Gendry of leaving her when it was her who left. Jeyne and me, we'd never leave Gendry. She had brown hair, colour of ash, and grey eyes, dead eyes. Fierce, she was. Dressed as a boy, and even so she was already growing beautiful. More beautiful than I will ever be."

 _So Gendry did come here with Arya Stark,_ Brienne concluded. _The child could not invent this so convincingly._

The Lady of Tarth made her decision when she saw Jaime's face, turned ashen grey from the cold, his golden hair almost silver against the stark whiteness of the snow.

Brienne took Jaime in her arms, and brought him over the inn's doorstep, as one of the bawdy guests could carry a bride to the chamber for the bedding. Except that the bride did not blush, was somewhat dressed and perfectly unconscious, and the should-be-ribald guest carrying her was grim, and not prone to joking.

In a blur of fearful thoughts she hauled him upstairs until she stumbled into an empty room with a bed still made, and a cold hearth filled with dry firewood. It may have been the same one where Jeyne tended her wounds when Brienne had been captured by the Lady Stoneheart. When she laid Jaime down and turned around, she saw that the dead girl followed her, holding flint and steel in her hands, as well as a flagon smelling of something strong and nauseating. Jeyne pointed at the hearth, at the flagon and at Jaime, left her presents at the door and walked back.

Starting the fire came easy and its light made the world look less grey.

 _Jeyne cannot do it,_ Brienne realized, _fire can kill her like the other walking dead._ Be as it may, she barred the door and moved the rest of the sparse furniture to block it; a table, a chair, and her own sword. The window was small and placed higher than Ser Shadrich managed to climb in the tree, so it should do fine for the night.

 _Strongwine,_ Brienne concluded after smelling the second gift, _against the cold._ She pulled the cork off and pressed the cold glass to Jaime's mouth, pouring it in small amounts and in a very slow motion. She lifted his head on her arm, lest he choke from the stinky liquid, until a generous quantity safely found its way down his frozen throat.

The next guest who came calling was Benjen, confirming through closed door that their dead host had indeed taken in several living beings, all of them very young and not yet of age. All except Brienne, Benjen and Jaime. She'd told Benjen, Willow translating, that she could only protect the children, and only from the wights, not the walkers. So if the walkers came and broke into the inn that night, Jeyne said, then Brienne and the others should better try their luck in the tunnels of the old gods.

When Brienne thanked Benjen for the tidings and he left, the effects of strongwine made their appearance in a form of Jaime's last meal before they departed from the High Heart. The Lady of Tarth fought the disgust she felt and removed his tunic, careful not to smear the contents of his stomach in his hair, when one green eye went open and immediately closed again.

"It's funny," he said with both eyes closed and Brienne regretted she was not his sister, the blond goddess he surely wanted to see tending to his need. "The Hound does have the Lady Sansa, you know. Only he won't kill her. He's taking part in a mummers' show with her, can you imagine?"

Jaime laughed as if he were the Warrior himself, happy to conquer the lives of a mighty army of men. "Who could ever imagine that? The Hound's got the Lady Sansa... Even if it's Littlefinger pulling the strings of the fair lady, and not the burned dog..."

"The tall monk..." Brienne said, understanding dawning between her freckles.

"He didn't do it, Saltpans."

"I know," she said, remembering the men she and Gendry killed, certain that no other place would suffer the destiny of Saltpans. Not from Rory and Biter in any case. The thought filled her with a great sense of accomplishment, and her swollen lips curved into a huge confident smile.

"What else do you know, wench?" his voice sounded deeper than usual. Both green eyes shot open and looked in the direction of the flagon. "More, I beg you. It's been a while that I haven't tasted so vile a thing. But it makes my blood run again, and that seems to be a good thing now.

She held the flagon for him as he drank, uncertain if she were doing the right thing.

"Lord Arryn asked if you were a knight after you collapsed," she volunteered.

"Sweet wench. That's it. This is what I swore my Kingsguard vows for, to ride out, and protect children from harm, and women, and shy maidens. Wait, where are my manners? You are a knight as well, aren't you? Then why is it only me getting the knight's medicine?" he said pushing the flagon to her hands.

Then he added, more gently, "You must be cold as well, my lady."

And she was. She just didn't have time to notice it yet. She pulled away from him realising her teeth were making a strange clicking sound, and she could barely feel her sword hand fingers as her own. The fire from the hearth cast soft shadows over his naked chest, part singed and barren, part covered with soft blond hairs, like a head of a baby.

"Oh, I know," he said in a dark tone, shooting way off the target. "You think that I bedded my sister here. I might have. King Robert liked to travel."

The image his words caused was too much for Brienne who smelled the flagon and shivered, wishing she had just let him rest in peace in the maidenly white snow.

"And you know what else?" he said, getting off bed, snatching the strongwine out or her hands and giving it a good pull. "I should have bedded you instead of being stupid enough to fight you. When I was still man enough. With two hands."

"I should have been born a man," she said sternly, "then you would have fought me with no regrets and later on you would have left me to die."

"Whatever you say," he snorted, seemingly offended.

She willed her shaking away and walked back to him, yanking the flagon out of his hand with as much tenderness as when she pressed Loras Tyrell hard to the ground, only to win a short-lived place in King Renly's Kingsguard.

The liquid smelled _and_ tasted vile, she concluded, amazed all the while that a man such as Jaime could think of himself as less than one. She drank some more to chase away the uncomfortable thought that he started mocking her just like her failed suitors did, and she didn't want to beat him bloody because he was, well, Jaime.

She didn't know how she ended between blankets. A fur was tossed over her and her boots and breeches, still wet from snow, were blessedly gone. She sprawled on her stomach. A long leg curled over her calves, an arm around her waist. A press of lips under her hair, near the left ear, was an unexpected gift. It was as she always imagined a man's touch could be before she had had her share of failed marriage offers; bold, yet maddeningly sweet, just like a great duel with no winner.

"Brienne," he said. "I missed you. Did you miss me, if only a little bit?"

Lady Brienne of Tarth firmly believed that the last words of Ser Jaime Lannister were nothing but a beautiful dream she was having after an exhausting day.

**Elder Brother**

"You have to admire the man," Mance Rayder said to the Elder Brother, observing how Lord Baelish greeted Ser Bonifer Hasty, the most pious leader of the garrison guarding Harrenhal. Littlefinger's mouth was more filled with praise of the Seven than the narrow sea was of water. "He has a way out of every situation," the Northman continued. "Impressive, I'd say. We should learn from him."

"I'd rather not," Elder Brother disagreed in few choice words, wondering why he felt less talkative than ever in his life of the servant of the Seven, since he woke up from his slumber at the High Heart. Speaking to people he knew proved more demanding than giving out seven blessings to the unknown soldiers. So he blessed, and blessed, and blessed some more, and kept silent in the presence of the Hound, the singer, and the Lady Stark.

The Hound had first saved his life in Pennytree, and the Elder Brother returned the favor by chance, and a lucky strike of his dagger. Then the Hound saved him again, in the firepit, as surely as the winter had come. The Elder Brother did not know what to make of this repeated gesture of a sworn killer, by his own words and beliefs.

"We have glimpsed foul things in the wood, my lord," Ser Bonifer said, expecting guidance from the rightful master of Harrenhal, "wolves and worse at night, things such as have never walked these lands."

"The Seven will surely save us all," Baelish bleated, dismounting with difficulty for his lack of arm. "Good ser, do join me for supper later on. Ser Daven, would you come as well?"

 _As if the Seven could do it all by themselves when men cannot,_ thought the Elder Brother, thankful he had not been included in the kind supper invitation, wondering where the heretic thought doubting the omnipotence of the Seven had come from. _I am different now,_ he thought. He knew it in his heart but he could not pinpoint where the distinction resided. He touched his head and felt the stubble of hair around his ears growing longer. He would have to ask men for a razor to get rid of it, when they settled in the castle for the night.

"Elder Brother," the singer called on to him in the yard. "Could you take my role of a master of the show since we have come to the scene where I join in as a player. I will read the role of Lord Howland Reed even if I am much stronger in stature. I'll walk on my knees most of the time and hide this difference with my cloak."

"It looks like the prompter is not available," the monk complained curtly.

"I don't need him," Mance said. "It are my words, I know them best of all. And the Lady Sansa remembers fast."

They settled to rehearse on one of the wallwalks of Harrenhal, amidst the scorched walls, too many feet above the ground. Not as high as the Wall up north, but very high still.

The dragonfire was long gone, but the masonry still loomed black and ominous, melted like a giant tallow candle. The view of the forest far away in the distance, through the narrow openings for archers, showed only a dark green expanse of unwelcoming kind. _At least the trees still have most of their leaves over there,_ thought the Elder Brother. The Lady Sansa inspected the woods searching for something, and Sandor Clegane had climbed with them, following in the Elder Brother's steps as a sworn shield, although he was not needed at the scene.

"Reed went with Stark to Dorne when the kingdom was won, didn't he?" the Elder Brother had to ask, overwhelmed by a sudden curiosity, not knowing why the plot of the silly show had caught his interest.

"He did. And the kingdom was won… or lost, some would say," the singer insinuated in a glum voice.

"To say it was lost would be treason," the Elder Brother warned, but his need to learn lingered. "Have you met the man?" he had to ask Mance. "He is one of the few men in Westeros I should very much like to meet. How is he? The tales say the crannogmen don't allow anyone to see them if they don't want to be seen, and that their seat, the Greywater Watch, never stands still. It's always on the move, between the marshes of the Neck swerving with lizard lions, lost to all but a chosen few."

"I guess he wanted to be seen by me," Mance said. "My pardons, Elder Brother, but why is the business of the old gods, with all respect towards your southron faith."

"The old gods," the Elder Brother repeated and remembered himself, barely over twenty, standing in the godswood somewhere in the south. It was a memory he never had before and he wondered why any of his two failed marriages would be celebrated in front of the old gods at all. It was not very common in the fertile fields of Highgarden where he came from.

"Good sers," Sansa said, "let us be over with this. I long for some refreshment before it turns dark."

"The lady is right," Mance said and lay sideways in front of the parapet of the wallwalk, next to one of the larger openings in the outer wall. The blue of the lake below and the grey sky above him framed the scene, the nature borrowing its majesty to help the players.

The Elder Brother could not tear his eyes away from the lake. _God's Eye._ It reminded him of wooing a maiden on the shores of one, somewhere in his youth, acting every single bit like Florian the Fool. Even if he forgot how being in love felt, and the memory, like all he remembered from before, lacked any taste or colour.

Lady Sansa approached Mance, wearing her mask.

"Good ser, who do you serve? I should accompany you to a maester to treat your injuries. The three squires who attacked you were most unkind."

"I owe fealty to Lord Rickard Stark, Warden of the North. I am his bannerman. And I serve no one, for I am a lord of my people despite my young age. Lord Howland Reed, of Greywater Watch, if it pleases you, my lady."

"I am Lady Lyanna Stark, Lord Rickard's only daughter. By the old gods, I have a duty to see that my father's bannerman gets the help he may need."

"Lady Lyanna, may I be excused for saying so, but I have heard that your prowess with a lance surpasses your beauty."

"How would you know of that?"

"I have seen you joust, in my dreams. Have you heard of the green dreams, my lady?"

"Old Nan told us about them, the bringers of portents of things to come. What have you dreamed about me, my lord? Shall I have a long, happy life and bear healthy children to my lord husband?" Lyanna asked with a tad of mocking.

"None of that, my lady. A child you will bear, but in great suffering."

Lyanna made a step backward, and the Elder Brother felt he should interfere. "She is not afraid of Reed. Lyanna Stark was fearless about her destiny. All history scrolls agree on that. That is perhaps why she died. Singer, repeat the last part, so that the lady can react better."

Mance spoke about her suffering again, and Lyanna didn't move when she replied in a voice forged of ice. "I have always known that my destiny only contained coldness, honour and duty. There is no sense in wishing it were any different. But I tell you now, Lord Reed, in this tourney you shall see me wield a lance, and the squires who attacked you will learn their manners. On my honour as a Stark. I swear it by the blood I share with the First Men. "

"And I swear it by the bronze and iron, I swear it by the ice and fire, Lady Lyanna, if you do what you say, your suffering shall start. Are you willing to embark on the path that this would open before you?"

"If your dreams had been green in truth, then that path is mine to take, whether it is my will to walk upon it or not," Lyanna said decisively.

"Young maidens should dream of happiness, not of vengeance and embracing pain."

"I do dream of happiness, my lord, but it is only that, a dream. For if I pluck it for myself, it will mean the torment of others, more noble than I. Have you seen Princess Elia, my Lord? She is as innocent as gods have ever made a woman. Would that I could be like her; soft, gentle, and kind. Would that I have never touched a lance, or left my father's solar for the training yard of men."

"Princess Elia and you may be more different than night and day, my lady, but that does not make you undeserving of happiness. One day you will remember my words."

The Elder Brother said, "That was better. If I may add as a scholar, Elia was a magnificent woman, and a true princess, but Lyanna, from all stories of her, she had the bearing of a queen. She just never realized it herself before she died."

"A proper little lady," Sandor Clegane commented. "But if she was born a beggar, she'd die like one, no matter the bearing. Such is the will of the Seven you love so dearly, Elder Brother. To keep us caged, and well in our place."

"And what would you know about the ladies?" Mance asked, helping Lady Sansa down the lower step of the outer wall. She had climbed on it to perform better, or to see more clearly whatever she was looking for in the woods. The Elder Brother wondered what it was, finding her similar to the white trees of the north; slender, skin pale like their bark, and hair matching the strident colour of the sad weirwood eyes.

"You've never had a wife, haven't you, what, with being a monk in the south?" the northerner would not let Brother Gravedigger in peace.

"No wife and no lands," Sandor Clegane said with sincerity. "Only two arms and a face of a Stranger. It's more than enough on most days."

"A woman can heal a man from almost any suffering," the singer said gravely. "What do you think, Elder Brother? You were married, I understand, before Robert's Rebellion."

"Twice," he replied and knew that the singer had it right because he was familiar with the facts of his own life. And yet, as always, he tried hard to remember how his wives looked, but as every time, he could not. The Trident gave him back his life but it also took its toll. He would never remember his previous existence as he had lived it and experienced it, only a dry account in his memories of what he knew happened to him, devoid of any real human sentiment. "But it was so long ago that I have nothing to say on the matter."

**Sandor**

The Hound descended from the walls alone, in strides so large that they would shame giants.

The knowledge that he had spent the last night of the long summer seated next to Sansa Stark made him wild, and willing to break somebody's neck for pure enjoyment, so he was best set to avoid the company of others. He'd been wide awake and aching, gazing at the stream, spying at her gracious hands grasping pebbles, driven mad by the rustling of her skirts mingled with the quiet sound of running water. He smelled the freshness of things still green, still alive, more acutely than ever since he was a small child and his face was still his. The mild air caressed his skin and his burns, with sweet promises of more nights to come.

 _Except that they will never come, won't they now?_ he mused, his thoughts black, his grey gaze even darker.

He decided to scout the insides of Harrenhal, counting the soldiers, the number and the positions of the guards, and most importantly the exits. Sandor Clegane did not believe in curses and Harrenhal was the place like any other. But with the large part of the Lannister army roaming around, it was better to be prepared. His hardened battle senses were on the rise ever since they glimpsed the tall towers of the castle. He even noticed some of _Gregor's_ men in the surviving portion of the Kingslayer's troops when they were still on their way. While he didn't share the singer's horseshit view about the gods forsaking Harrenhal, the gnats currently within it were capable enough of committing brave deeds that would make the gods avert their heads in revulsion, without any help from the Stranger himself.

Having a task was good because it gave him a pause to think, a break in his poisoned condition. His being was full of Sansa, and the Hound was more unsettled than ever.

 _She knew what you wanted, dog,_ he told himself. _Probably any woman would by the look of misery on your face. She knew what was on your mind when the Blackwater burned as well. Except kissing her was not everything what was passing through your head, then. A kiss was the only thing you desired, the only thing you would have taken if she could only look at you. But it was not all that you thought about, was it, dog? You thought of other things as well, and it makes you the sickest bastard in the Seven Kingdoms. Even if you would not have done it, you still thought of it, if only for a moment. Face it, dog, you are no better than Gregor. You thought of making her yours so that no one else could do it, so that no one could take your mark away from her. She wouldn't even get it back then, but now she would. She'd know now what it was you wanted. And if she could see in that sick part of your mind, she'd never let you near her again, her tiny hands, her lovely neck, her hair that smells of flowers and blessed oblivion…_

He passed the large inner courtyard where a wooden dais still stood next to the castle walls. It must have been a gibbet in use not that long ago. Dried blood and torn pieces of rope could still be seen on the thick wooden boards. A well was standing close by, but the thought that anyone could drink from it made him uneasy. _A fit stage for tomorrow's reading, no doubt,_ Sandor thought. _We should rehearse the bloody tourney of Lord Whent on it._ He noted that the yard was a perfect trap. Far from the well guarded castle gates which were an insurmountable obstacle of their own, with almost no space to retreat if the enemy would approach it from more sides. One could only jump into the well or run upon one's own blade to choose swift death.

He slipped behind the dais and found a servant's door to the castle, leading to a narrow corridor. The passage joined a much a broader one on the right hand side, which went up to the higher levels of the tower. "The Kingspyre Tower," he heard the servants saying.

Sandor Clegane returned to the door and faced a very narrow tunnel on the left hand side he didn't see before, because it was so low that he had to bow and almost crawl to squeeze his oversized body through the opening and continue further. _I would not be able to this in my armour,_ he thought, grateful that the Faith stripped him of that. It made him inconspicuous after so many years of being feared, and it had been a welcome change. After the opening, the corridor became higher and wider so he could walk normally and his thoughts wandered away from his body to more overwhelming matters.

 _She let you kiss her neck and her hands_ , he thought, _she saw through you and commanded you to do it, the dog as you are._ But if a highborn woman allowed or asked for such things, mostly it meant she wanted to be _courted_. It's what he heard people say in the Lannister household when he was still a squire. The word dawned on him and drummed in his head, imposing as the sound of bells calling men to arms in Casterly Rock, announcing another raid of the ironborn to Lannisport. And the soldiers went knowing that many would find death.

By the time he had reached the dungeons in his wandering, his thoughts were even blacker than the untouched darkness they contained. They stretched for leagues under the castle or so it seemed, and they must have been populated by people not that long ago, judging by all kinds of remains in some of the cells he didn't wish to dwell on: the link between the gibbet and the dirty cells silently explained.

He found several tunnels leading towards the outer walls, if his sense of the measure of space had not been playing tricks on him. Sandor Clegane followed two of them to the dead end of masonry, rubble and moss, but the stones at the end of the third one could be moved if one was strong enough, and the Hound certainly was. Behind a pair of loose blocks he could glimpse a yellow field, and a few lonely tall trees standing on a hill, with their top branches still bathed in the last sunlight of the day.

 _A way out,_ he thought. He laboured in the dark to widen the passage until the dimness of dusk illuminated the prison of Harrenhall with the grey gloom of winter, and he would be able to get out reasonably fast if he wanted. He put the loose stones back on their place, and hid what he did with rubble so that even a pair of sharp and very watchful guard eyes from the battlements would not see anything but the thick wall.

 _How do your court a woman? By bringing flowers?_ The Hound laughed inwardly at the stupid suggestion he could do anything like that. _You tell them how lovely they are when you don't mean it at all, that's the way of it._ Many a time he heard the handsome knights boosting about their bedchamber conquests in the winesinks, so he could pretty much repeat the range of the silly words that seemed to have a way of working with women. Something about their hair shining like a sun, to start with.

Except that Sansa's hair shone ten times _brighter_ than the sun, and he wished he did not find her more beautiful than any lady he had ever seen, so that sweet lies would come easy to him, if only they could make her look at his miserable face with anything else but rejection.

He traced several times back and forth the fastest way from the dungeons exit to the castle level, coming finally out to the yard from a broad corridor leading to the upper parts of the tower. A crystal laugh of the little bird could be heard from above, shedding a dazzling light of her voice into the bottomless pond of darkness of his being.

 _What is it then, to court a woman?_ he thought feverishly, and for a brief moment he wanted to do it. The silly words and the fading flowers, everything. He should have learned as a boy but he never thought he would need that particular art. Not for himself, in any case. But his mind now told him differently. _She didn't only allow you to kiss her hands, she asked you to keep her company. That's what the ladies ask of their knights, is it not? Bloody songs and cursed little lies…_

 _Baelish did not forget to invite her to supper, did he?_ Sandor Clegane thought and the poison of hatred ran strong through his veins one more time. _She had been his as well, she must have been._

 _So what will you do, miserable dog? Court a woman wed? And to the Imp of all people. How low can you fall? As if she needs a rabid cur for company…_ he scorned himself, melting in the shadow of one of the walls, quiet and dangerous as a statue of a stone dragon about to come to an eerie life. He just stood there, when a party of lords descended from the tower, to better hear what they were saying.

Little bird was on Ser Daven's arm and the Hound could not miss how the Littlefinger occasionally praised Ser Daven's bravery and sweet-talked Ser Bonifer, the great oaf in the service of the Seven. The absence of the Elder Brother whose rank was only surpassed by the High Septon in the hierarchy of the Faith was in itself a very telling thing.

The Hound's count of soldiers and guards led to another worrying conclusion that the knights of the House Corbray who changed their loyalty to the singer. just like the few surviving monks, were scattered and put to do duties as much away from each other as the huge ruins of Harrenhal allowed.

It did not bode well. Perhaps the singer was right and they should have never come to Harrenhal, cursed or not. The Elder Brother would never see it in his goodness, and Mance did not see it in his obsession with the show, but Sandor Clegane could not miss the signs of a good fight brewing. Baelish did not only come to take possession of his property. He came to reaffirm his possession of Sansa and of young Lord Arryn whenever the Kingslayer returned him. As a caring watchful father. _Bloody bastard!_ _Even my own father did better than that,_ thought the Hound, _he did let Gregor get away with things and he'd paid for it with his life in the end, but he cared for all three of us in his own way._

When he could not hear Sansa any more, he walked to the outer wall to continue his tour. By the morning his greatsword would be honed. Whatever came his way, Sandor Clegane would be ready.

**Sansa**

Sansa was happy to lose Ser Daven as soon as the propriety allowed it and to retire for the night. The castle was grand and empty, with draught coming from the walls and crevices, from chambers whose vaults had been burnt away and never rebuilt. _I could never feel warm here,_ she thought, _not even in the middle of the summer, much less now, at the turn of the seasons._

But she had felt warm the night before by the river, in the company of one of the most vicious men in Westeros, enjoying the silence and the last breath of summer. The Hound seemed tense and brooding, but at least he did not speak to spoil the beauty of the night with unpleasant truths. _It was a kindness,_ she thought. They stayed together until the hour of the wolf, when she returned to her pallet and he just walked behind her like a ghost.

Sansa's room in Harrenhal was on the second floor of the Wailing Tower, from the looks of it recently repaired and put back to use, right next to Ser Bonifer's, who occupied one of the best and the most spacious rooms as the commander of the garrison, and Petyr wanted someone with soldier instincts to watch her steps. But Sansa had once been Alayne and bastard born, even if for a short time, so she donned her thin slippers and hid her hair in a cloak, escaping to the armoury as soon as no sound of boots could be heard in the long deserted corridors of the castle. Her feet carried her down the great stone stairs like wings, flying on the giddiness that came upon her since the night at the river, an unrest of bubbling joy and strange hopes for the future.

She didn't know why she had to go to the armoury, but the sensation she must was as strong and compelling as when she rode to face the dead. Nymeria was in the woods, she could sense her nearing Harrenhal. _Stay away,_ she thought. _Don't come out of the forest and near men who can hurt you like they did with Lady._ The castle was full of soldiers. There was barely room for every man to sleep under a roof not ruined by fire. A pack of wolves, no mater how large, would not be a match for men with their steel and torches in the open fields.

The door creaked when she pushed it open. Closing it behind her, she considered lighting a candle, wavered the thought away, and let the moonlight illuminate her path. Weapons, old and new, of all sorts, stared at her from the walls and lay in front of her on the ground. Daggers and axes, swords and lances, shields and helms, and pieces of armour. Most of them had seen better days, or were simply abandoned, with no tales of grand tourneys and victories to tell.

Sansa walked several times up and down, unsure of what she'd been looking for. Something stirred in the far corner under the window, but she first dismissed it as a bat nesting in the high wooden beams of the armoury's ceiling.

Her search proved fruitless so she turned towards the perceived movement and followed it, having no other clue. _It has to be here,_ she concluded, _whatever it is._

It was not a bat that moved, nor a spider, but a small black raven who must have lost its way. The bird croaked on the ceiling beam when she walked slowly towards it and to the pile of weapons under the place where it fluttered, shrieking every now and then to catch her attention. When she neared the bird, it spread its wings and flew out through the crevices high up the wall as if it had never been there in the first place. _So much for guidance I sought,_ she thought, blaming herself for a silly girl, a dove, as Queen Cersei would say.

_I imagined it all and who knows what would have happened when I rode away from everyone if the Hound did not come. A woman's lot is all there is. There is nothing else, only that. To give my hand in marriage to the highest bidder for my claim, hoping he will not be too unkind._

An object caught her attention, a tourney lance, but not quite long enough, almost as if it was made for a crannogman, or a woman... Sansa fancied it to be Aunt Lyanna's even if she knew it could not be. Aunt Lyanna only came to Harrenhal to watch the tourney of Lord Whent, and she would not be allowed to wield a lance in the company of her betrothed, her father and her brothers. _The songs and I,_ she thought, _I really should know better by now._ But even as she scorned herself, her head was already somewhere in the clouds, fantasising about her aunt, a beautiful noble lady with Arya's eyes and with Sansa's height, proudly challenging the knights of the kingdom to a joust, her hair colour of dark ash like Jon's blowing in the wind.

"A beautiful item, that," the voice of the singer said and Sansa startled. "Well crafted. You should ask one of your southron knights though to tell you if it's any good for jousting. I can't tell you that. Never ran with the lance in my whole life."

He must have been seated in the darkness for a very long time and observed her when she entered.

"It could be Aunt Lyanna's, by the length," Sansa gave voice to her thoughts.

"Take it then. I was also looking for some weapons we could use in the show. No one here has much use for these it seems, best if we just take what we want. Lord Baelish will not miss the old metalwork too much, I'd reckon."

"His weapon is his tongue," Sansa said quietly. "Have you find something as well?"

"A few useful pieces of armour, here and there. I know something about that although I never wore one. Nothing large enough to fit our Rhaegar. We should ask Gendry to reshape them a bit with his art, but somehow I doubt he will be willing."

"Would this fit?" Sanda picked up a black breastplate from the floor, realizing as soon as she did it that it was not broad enough for the Hound and it lacked in height as well, even if the man who wore it once must have been tall, like the singer or the Elder Brother, taller than Petyr or even Ser Jaime. She almost dropped the plate when she realized that the Hound from her dreams, who was an absent measure for other men in her life, had become so real. And there was more to it, she retained so much of him with her furtive looks here and there when they travelled or read in the past days, that she could be quite confident in judging his height and width compared to most other things.

"I doubt. We'd need a giant armour. But they don't wear them either, you know. And they speak a language of their own."

"Have you seen giants? Where?" Sansa had to ask.

"You know or you suspect where I really come from. You know where Jon went from Winterfell, don't you?"

Sansa imagined a white vastness laid with snow where men had no laws, and the giants walked freely among them. She heard that the Wall kept those people out of the realm, for they were dangerous, and wild. And for the first time she wondered, after everything she had been through, if the use of the Wall may have been also in protecting those people, the wildlings, from the ruthlessness of the great lords and great ladies of Westeros, involved in their game of thrones.

"There are giants over there? Beyond the Wall?" she asked in awe, thinking that this was how Arya must have felt when she went exploring the woods around Winterfell with their brothers without their father's permission, and Sansa stayed in the castle like a good girl and practiced her needlework.

 _Nothing wrong with that either,_ she thought proudly, _it saved Gendry's life if the Elder Brother didn't lie._

"Giants and direwolfs, mountain eagles and snow bears, wargs and skinchangers, and foul things, of late."

"Here," she said, handing him the breastplate "take it for the show. Maybe it would fit Ser Jaime."

"It's black," the singer said. "The colour of the House Targaryen. Dayne should wear the white armour of the Kingsguard that Ser Jaime happens to possess if he ever cares to join our mummery again. Something tells me he will not if he can choose otherwise. You keep it. It's good steel. We can sell it in King's Landing if we find no use for it."

"So you came south to look for help haven't you? Jon sent you, or asked you to go, didn't he?" she inquired, breathless at her new understanding of the singer's purpose.

"Aye, Sansa. Part of the way, at least."

"You may discover there is no help to be found over here," she said, "only sweet lies."

"The truth is always hidden somewhere beneath them," he replied in earnest, "you just have to dig long and deep enough to find it."


	16. By My Own Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where there is a tourney, to everyone's delight.

**Sansa**

Sansa stood next to the lake outside the walls of Harrenhal, clutching a lance she had found in the armoury way too firm in her right hand. The Hound and the singer were busy trying to show her how to hold it and simulate the movement of the joust, but the effort was rather hopeless, at best.

The elder daughter of Catelyn Tully was meant to hold a needle, not a lance.

The calmest of all horses they could find grazed the yellow grass nearby, a white and grey animal, so old that it appeared to be dying.

Some hours later, the horse still lived, yet Sansa's grip on the weapon was none the better.

"Good sers, I am sorry," she said, embarrassed, observing Petyr watching from behind, playing the role of an obedient prompter once again.

Three peasants with wooden shields and sticks stared at them with watchful eyes, mounted on ploughing horses, eager and curious to take part in a play where a lady, dressed as a mystery knight, would unhorse them. The singer gave them a chicken each, bought with promises of better life in the capital from the villagers of Pennytree. The new chicken owners stuck to their wooden lances even clumsier than Sansa held her own, but that didn't make her feel any more at ease.

 _The Hound would call them gnats,_ she thought, _and he would be right. And I can't even stand my own ground against them. How could I ever hope to run away from Petyr, the Lannisters, the Tyrells and all such people for good? How could I make them respect me, or at least leave me be?_

She tried to lift the lance again imagining Joffrey's face as a target, but it didn't help either. The grasp was unnatural and the weapon felt foreign in her arms. Even if it had become a cherished thing in her imagination already: after a short and restless night sleep she'd been now convinced that it must have been Aunt Lyanna's. _No man would have been so small._

 _My aunt was a mystery knight,_ Sansa's heart fluttered at the thought, _but that is obviously a lie and a way for Jon's friend to earn golden dragons in the capital. Maybe that is the help they need on the Wall, coin._

The Elder Brother stared at the lake, the blue of its water reflecting eerily the thin layer of frost fallen over the yellow fields at night, calm and flat as a masterfully crafted looking glass.

"Lady Stark," the Hound said, and Sansa startled at his use of her proper title. Somehow she would have always expected him to call her girl. Or a little bird, when they were alone or if he were not careful.

 _What should I call you,_ she thought. _Brother?_ She couldn't call him that, so she was a good girl and looked at her feet.

"Mummery, mummery at the lake!" someone cried out his lungs. "Come and see! A tourney! They will show us a tourney!"

The motley multitude of soldiers and peasants started gathering like flies on a carcass, like an incessant river flowing to the lake. Benches no one asked for were brought from the kitchens, and from the soldier barracks. Apparently those who had travelled with them since the Quiet Isle warned Ser Bonifer's garrison that the play was something to look at, and even if it weren't, on that day there was going to be a joust! And Sansa had learned to her sorrow that nothing worked better than the sight of blood of one's neighbour to cheer the hearts of others, ofttimes more miserable that the unfortunate man bleeding.

"Lady Stark," the Hound repeated under the cowl. "You must forget what you are holding. Think of it as an offered arm of a knight accompanying you. Accept it naturally, it will not make your arm fall off."

The Hound offered her his strong arm to show his meaning, and she hanged on it for dear life, more embarrassed than ever, before the multitude that came to watch. He tensed but he didn't let her go. They both listened attentively to the unfriendly yelling of the crowd. "Pia could play the noble girl," someone screamed, "and show us her cunt as well, to those that have not seen it yet."

Mance boomed, thundering over his chosen battlefield of verses, "You want to watch, shut up! You don't want to, get out of here! Plenty of floors to scrub, stables to muck out, and swords to sharpen in the castle! Pia's role in this show is to faint, when I tell her to, nothing else."

Pia nodded in solemn understanding, standing behind the other players and close to Petyr.

The silence of the congregation was not perfect, but it got a bit better.

The noise made the Elder Brother turn his head slowly from the lake and join them on the clearing in front of it, which was to be their stage on that day.

"Here," he said, "if I may offer my advice of a former hedge knight to a lady. Up on the horse you go, my lady, there, I would give you a more spirited one when and if we live to play in the capital, but this one will do for now. Just so."

Sansa was high in the saddle and the Elder Brother held the short lance out towards her in practised movements of one used to jousting. "First in your left arm, there, look at me, no, look at the Brother Gravedigger behind those good people.

The Hound had moved quickly as a shadow to stand right behind and tower over the man curious to see Pia's womanhood, and Sansa was suddenly afraid of what he might do to him.

"Good. Now move it to your right arm without looking, and direct it to the Brother Gravedigger, just so, parallel to the horse, don't think about what you're doing. Good. Don't lose your grip and ride!"

The Elder Brother let go and tapped the rump of the horse until the old beast started moving. Sansa made several clumsy circles on the clearing, bent above the head of the old horse, her lance firm in her hand and pointed forward. After the third circle she tentatively moved the weapon to her left hand and back to her right hand and stopped.

And looked at the three peasants that were to be Lyanna's enemies and charged. Unhorsing one of them as she went among the crazy clapping, wild whistles and cheers.

"Others take me" a washerwoman swore loudly, "this is the best I have seen since the mummers came from Oldtown and played us the Battle of the Bells. Then the one playing King Robert, Seven bless his soul, came out naked as on his name day out of the whore house, and brought down the red haired griffin with his hammer, fighting only in his skin as gods have made him."

The odd story didn't quite sound like a history lesson Septa Mordane gave Sansa about the famous victory of Robert Baratheon, but it somehow gave her more courage than the truth. Soon she defeated all three peasants several times in a row before Mance was satisfied and commanded her to sit down next to Pia on a wooden dais, generously built for high lords and ladies by the most assiduous watchers of the show. Corbray and Blackwood were seated together a bit away from the women, wearing stern expressions. Corbray's nose was deep in some parchment, and the Elder Brother was with them too. When Sansa dismounted and sat down, Corbray started:

"Ser Barristan, I command you, find the mystery knight and arrest him before he leaves the tourney grounds. I should very much like to speak to him about _his bravery_ ," the voice of King Aerys was coloured with rage and malice. The singer nodded approvingly at his performance.

"As soon as the tourney is done for the day, Your Grace, if it pleases you."

"Very well," Aerys Targaryen condescended with heavy heart, "but not a minute later."

The Elder Brother apparently posed as Ser Barristan Selmy for the occasion, and Sansa did not understand why, until a huge opening was made on the clearing, resembling the lists of a real tournament. Two dark clad man faced each other on true warhorses, with long lances fit for men, the space between them stretched to a proper jousting distance. _The Elder Brother and the Hound, riding Patience and Stranger,_ Sansa thought, hoping that Gendry did not notice that Mance's horse trotted to Harrenhal shortly after them, without the monk who went looking for Willow. She also hoped that the Hound was not going to hurt the older man.

 _Ser Barristan should wear the white armour of the Kingsguard and Rhaegar the black one of the House Targaryen,_ she mused. But those armours were lost like the times they represented. Both men wore incomplete suits of steel, strapped on them from mismatched pieces of mail Mance scavenged in the armoury the night before. All dark and dull, like the burnt walls of Harrenhal. The Hound replaced his monk's cowl by a simple helm, which did not cover his head entirely, but it still hid his face as was his wont.

The contenders rode past each other two times. They tilted sideways, trying hard to unhorse one another. The movement carried them on, like a strange deadly dance that both men were good at. Bodies bent and lances clashed and splintered, but the riders remained in the saddle to the utmost contentment of the people.

"Seven bless their servants" cried the washerwoman, "them are better than the late King Robert!"

In the third pass Sandor Clegane closed in, riding straight as a pole, and swung to one side at the last possible moment, toppling the Elder Brother amidst the frost and the yellow grass, nearly falling off himself.

The winner straightened up and rode, and rode, and rode several more circles on the clearing as the mud and the grass were lifted in the air by the destruction of Stranger's hooves. Until the rider dismounted in front of Sansa and left a crown of tiny wild flowers in her lap, bowing when he delivered them all the way to the frozen ground.

"Now, Pia!" shouted Mance.

Pia promptly fainted next to Sansa, who stood slowly up and gave a slight nod to the tourney champion, proper of the newly crowned Queen of Love and Beauty.

Sansa wondered if Sandor Clegane would have crowned her when he won the Hand's tournament if he had ever had a chance to choose his queen. _He probably wouldn't,_ she concluded, _he thought of me then as a stupid girl._

But on that day in front of the lake of Harrenhall, the sun shone brightly as if there was no night, and nothing could go wrong at all. Sansa's eyes looked for the cold grey ones through the narrow opening of the visor, and the borders of her lips curled up in a genuine smile. The breeze was playing with her hair and with the blue ribbons Pia must have attached to her grey gown when Sansa was not looking.

Unasked by the singer, she took one out and handed out her favour to the Hound. He pressed the thin blue fabric to the helm where his ruined lips should have been, and was up again on Stranger's back in no time.

The Hound spurred his horse wildly, and went for another round, the Stranger's hooves lost in a whirlwind of dust, in sheer demonstration of his physical power. _This is not his doing,_ Sansa wanted to believe, _Mance must have commanded this display of arrogance from the dragon prince._ Yet she was pleased beyond measure and her heart softened slowly, like ice in spring.

The Elder Brother rejoined Ser Lyn Corbray on the other side of the dais, and Aerys II growled in righteous anger, "The mystery knight! Don't look for him any more, Ser Barristan. Your King has more pressing matters to attend. I will ride back to King's Landing with my son tomorrow and teach _him_ some manners."

The eruption of joy from the crowd was impossible to contend and Mance guided all the players to stand in one line and bow to the public.

"We should better train this too for the capital," he said, and to Sansa he seemed extremely pleased with the tourney scene. Sansa and the Hound were in the middle, holding hands, and she noticed his fingers were inexorably warm in contrast with a polished fine hand of Ser Lyn on her other side. Pia also stood next to Sandor Clegane, curtsying like a real lady, while the noises of approval would not stop.

When the onlookers finally started leaving, Sansa gathered her skirts and turned back to walk to the castle gates alone, having ridden entirely too much for that day. The singer has already gone back, and the Hound and the Elder Brother lingered behind to take care of the horses.

Then Petyr was suddenly in front of her, his face twisted like Joffrey's in his death throes, hissing sharply, "Sweetling, mark my words, I will have your cunt as surely as the poxy man who spoke about it will have the cunt of the little whore your _singer_ just employed to play the unfortunate princess Elia."

Petyr lifted his remaining arm, approaching fast, and Sansa knew that in the next moment he was going to hit her.

Sansa would never know if it was the play that gave her wings, if it was the crowd cheering for her, or if it was the will of the gods, old or new. Petyr had tormented her for long without using force, feeding her fears and insecurities, and now he was about to strike at her as he must have known she deserved. But maybe knowledge was not that important as Septa Mordane taught her. Maybe brute force was.

Seconds later, seconds that felt like minutes, that felt like hours, that felt like years gone by since the doom of the old Valyria, and utterly without knowing how she managed to do what she did, Sansa was standing on Petyr with both her feet, beating him hard with her right boot she had to wear for riding. She looked at her hands and they were both filled with his hair, short and greying, the missing patches clearly visible on his scalp where she pulled it out. She hit him without mercy until her legs felt numb, and then simply walked away, leaving him there without a second look back, only paying attention to take with her the Aunt Lyanna's lance and the garland of flowers.

 _Prince Rhaegar crowned my aunt with winter roses,_ she thought and looked at the humble yellow wild flowers her own crown contained. But the sight of the huge hands laying a simple wreath in her lap made her flutter all over, and she would not wish for another crown, though it were wrought for the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.

Sansa walked back through the enormous gateway of Harrenhal, bigger than the Winterfell inner courtyard, and Winterfell was by no means a small castle, not noticing the signs of fresh violence and struggle it contained. She glided in with such dignity that she didn't even notice how all the soldiers who saw what she had done were now respectfully letting her pass. Not a single one dared to look at her cleavage or toss her a rude remark. She went to her room and barred the door, leaving the lance next to it, and put the crown on her bed. Yellow, sweet smelling flowers, yellow like the autumn grass where the three black dogs died when the Hound's grandfather earned a sigil and a lordship for his family. Reminding her of the three black dogs hidden on the yellow border of Sandor Clegane's black tunic, worn continuously inside out by the last son of that house, for the time being.

 _Castle born and castle raised, that's what he is,_ she thought reviving in her mind the perfect gesture of the Hound bowing before her when he gave her the crown, more elegant and self assured than Ser Loras Tyrell himself could have done it.

 _My faceless knight,_ she thought. _Doing his best never to admit it. And I can't blame him for that._

Castle upbringing could only bring trouble in the world made and ruled by people who only seemed to care about bloodshed, and winning battles, and also about seeing somebody else's private parts.

She was certain that she was going to dream of a husband in her bed that night, one much larger than the one she had in the eyes of the law, Tyrion, the Imp, had any right to be.

**Jaime**

When Jaime woke up, the pain in his leg was gone.

Someone was knocking hard on the door of the room he was in and his stump was warm under something else that was not a blanket. _Cersei,_ he thought half asleep, and his nerves were on the edge, he was _never_ supposed to spend a night in her chambers. Someone could see. Someone would talk. Two blond heads on spikes would adorn the pale rosy walls of the Red Keep; two who came to the world, and left it, together.

Further movement revealed a strength of the presence he'd been holding on to, wrapped around it as far as he could in a tangle of joint sleep. She smelled of daily sweat and of something pungent and pure, of herbs growing next to the sea in the heat of a summer day.

The discovery, and knowledge, of who he was with spread through him as a wave of sweetness and eased his heart. Not so his body, where the press of lithe muscles similar to his own, but infinitely smoother and more beautiful, provoked a tension best left alone and uncared for in the dark of the night, lest she would beat him bloody like her other suitors.

"Brienne," he called her quietly, sliding his left arm accidentally across her chest. There were no large turnips there, he had to notice, but firm small peaks of roundedness that would fit perfectly in his hands, if he had two hands to start with. He became aware of the bareness of his chest, thoroughly enjoying the press of her soft long legs safely enclosed between his, a moment of warmth and tenderness committed to memory, to last for the winter, or for the Long Night if the gods were not that good as usual.

She was awake and alert at once, ruining the moment, finding her garments, tossing him his.

"We have to go and take the children" she told him, immediately making sense of what the obnoxious monk was shouting at them through the barred door. "One of the walkers is coming, or so says the dead girl. Best not wait to find out if half of what we have heard about the white walkers is true. I am faster now so I will lead, and you take the rear. Back where we came from, through the caverns."

"Aye, commander," said Jaime with all sarcasm he could muster, all dressed up in his stinky crimson tunic, and painfully sober, with his head about to burst from the effects of the strongwine, squeezing a hiltless dagger in his left hand for reassurance he didn't feel. His injured leg was wobbly but usable, and it was all he could hope to get.

The chase was crazy, and the children many. Jaime could not remember seeing any of them before he burned the wights and passed out. Brienne led the way with Benjen and his squires. An unknown lad with strange purple eyes shining like crazy in the darkness followed suit. Then came Hos Blackwood, the girl Lord Arryn protected, and finally the little lord of the Vale in person.

Jaime was the last one in the line behind them all. He couldn't see a foe, but the oppressive coldness of the corridors dug in earth by weirwood roots was very different than before. He wore an oversized grain bag over his tunic because there were plenty left in the inn, and almost no grain or barley left to store. It was better than dying from cold.

They were half way through when Lord Arryn started convulsing on the ground and foam came to his mouth. Willow kneeled next to him and would not leave but Jaime told her, signalling Hos and the purple eyed lad to take her away: "He wanted to defend you, keep you safe. For his sake, go with the others."

It worked and Jaime sighed in relief. Dealing with children was not his thing. He might have learned more, done better, had he been allowed to father his children. There was only one child left to save in the caves, and Jaime was not strong enough to carry him, not fast enough, not far enough. The cold was creeping behind them in the narrow corridor as surely as blood still ran through their veins.

A crazy thought occurred to him so he half pulled, half carried the little lord to the weirwood throne in the middle of the caverns where Lady Stoneheart had been seated. The throne was hollow and gnarled, knit from the bones and blood of the earth, majestic white and interlaced, but to Jaime, every sharp ridge of the wooden skin cut him deeper than the swords melted in the iron throne. _Unworthy,_ the unseeing eyes of the trees judged him in silence, _traitor_ , they continued, _coward!_

"Yes!" he said "I am all that! But I am trying now at the very least. So shut up, please, if you cannot help"

His challenge to the old gods launched in the air, he laid Robert Arryn, twitching, his little body colder than ice, in the hollowed high seat of the weirwood throne, as deep as it went. Jaime covered him with the bag he'd been wearing, grey and ugly, careful to fix the boy's head upright, so that he doesn't choke in the fit of his ailment. Even from a short distance the boy now looked as a weirwood root, somewhat moving in his spasms, but an ice cold wind of the night carried dust and dry branches around so it was all right.

Jaime crept under the throne, in a narrow precipice in which he could barely fit. For a moment he'd been afraid that the wood would sentence him to death and bury him more surely than the late Lady Catelyn did.

He huddled and he waited, not uttering a sound, certain that he was not a match for what was coming, regardless of the Valyrian steel dagger he still had in his hand. Caressing the weapon made him daydream about Brienne, exiting the subterranean corridor with the rest of their party, finding two of their horses grazing peacefully, in the land under the protection of the Ghost of the High Heart. He could even see his squires carrying his shiny Kinsguard armour, discarded where he fell in the pit.

 _If I lose Lord Arryn, Littlefinger will have the Vale in his pocket,_ he thought. _Father, what would you do in my place now?_

 _Bid your time. Wait,_ said the voice of Tywin Lannister in his head, not sounding fatherlike at all, but rather like a roar of a lion about to snap Jaime's neck.

That was when he heard the enemy before he saw it. A sick eagerness took him, to finally see the grumkin of the north, and live to tell the story to Tommen and Myrcella, about the day when their father faced a white walker, a monster of old.

The figure moved swiftly, _avoiding_ the roots of the tree, sniffing the air as it went. It had long white hair and a thousand years old face crossed with wrinkles, lines, and ridges, and crevices, and bright blue eyes. It made almost no sound.

It was death.

 _Bluer eyes than the sapphire ones she has_ , Jaime thought, enthralled, distracted for a second from his circumstance. Sinking deeper under the roots seemed like a most prudent thing to do, but the walker seemed to know he'd been there, hiding, and he approached the throne with uncanny interest in what was under it, rather than on top under the barley bag.

Jaime prepared to fight, not having much faith that the Valyrian steel would save him. This was not a brigand, and skill was required to pierce fast a vital part of the monster before it would crush him into pieces. A skill he did not hold in his left hand.

The enemy bent over with difficulty _,_ Jaime noticed, hoping he could turn that to his advantage.

The cold could almost be eaten with a spoon, like a thick plum sauce King Robert's best cook used to serve with venison, when the walker held out his arm and felt under the roots, the icy fingers coming inches away from Jaime's body. He could slice that arm, and risk not injuring the creature enough, being pulled out and killed. Or wait to be pulled out to try a better strike and be killed before he got a chance.

A crystal sound of falling water rang in the caves, startling the creature, and almost Jaime too, who had to fight hard not to breathe and stand as still as he possibly could. The white walker stood up, looked around, and waited.

And saw the movement hidden until then, of a sick child hidden in the shadows.

Jaime didn't think. He may have faced a bear unarmed, but now a sturdy small weapon was in his left hand, feeling almost like the last living thing in the desolation of the darkness.

He listened to his father and bid his time, but only for a second that took the walker to approach the source of the movement, the white throne.

And than he leapt like a young lion protecting his cub, not the future Lord Arryn of the Vale, but a child lost. He attacked fiercely, but the roar in his throat felt like the burning of the fire, when he cut through the sinews of the monster's throat in a single forward motion he'd never think himself capable of performing. Jaime severed its head and coiled in fear before the blue look the thing gave him, even as he still continued cutting.

Landing was harsh, on stone, amidst white and blue crystals falling like petals of a flower from an unknown land over the soiled crimson of his tunic and the gold of his tangled hair. _A winter rose,_ he thought, seeing that, and heard steps coming towards him. Steps of something having weight. Human steps.

"The damn northern singer was right," he told Brienne before he saw it was her. He spoke carelessly as if he just asked her if she wanted him to serve her a delicious treat from one of the trays at an opulent feast, "Valyrian steel can kill them."

**Robert Baratheon's son**

Gendry didn't go down to the lake because he still didn't like the singer, or Lady Sansa, although she had saved his life and was Arya's sister.

Instead he went to the forge, empty of all souls, just like most of the castle: its people gathered at the water to see the mummery. But the smithy was not a good place for him. He could almost picture himself leaving the throngs to rest after a day's work, dragging his tired feet out to the yard, and seeing Arya scurrying around with some errand. She would come from the Wailing Tower and run to the soldier barracks or to the Kingspyre Tower, smooth like water.

He didn't see Arya there, but instead a group of twenty soldiers armed to the teeth, a mixture of Lannister colours and banners with the Seven Pointed Star. They walked to the gates and Gendry was curious. He climbed the wallwalk leading towards the gate to better listen to their conversation from above. The men took position within the gateway, between the two huge doors leading in and out of the castle, as if they were setting a trap for a wild beast.

 _An ambush,_ thought Gendry, _but for whom?_

The men almost hurried to answer his question, never put out in a loud voice.

"I reckon the wolf bitch let the singer smell her cunt to do her bidding," said one of the Lannister soldiers. "Think poor Rhaegar kidnapped her aunt for no reason at all? They're all the same. They're known to be in heat. She slept with the northern singer, and with the huge monk, and Baelish just wants back what is his, or I am as daft as a brush."

"Seven bless you, mind your words, son. Gods gave you reason to use it wisely, or you will burn forever in seven hells," one of the warriors of the Faith reprimanded him. "The bard must be working together with the bastard wolf, the last living son of Lord Eddard Stark, and the last living brother of Lady Sansa. The tidings say that he's now the Lord Commander of the Night Watch. There was a raven from the capital that His Grace King Tommen intends to proclaim Lord Snow a traitor to the realm, conspiring with his Uncle Stannis to overthrow him. Lord Baelish has ordered the false singer's imprisonment as the rightful lord of this castle, and Ser Daven had supported him as per orders of Ser Jaime. If Mance Rayder, the King-beyond-the-Wall, whose life is forfeit in the Seven Kingdoms, came down south in person posing as a singer, he is here to commit some larger treason against the realm than just giving in to the temptation of the flesh…"

"No matter how beautiful that flesh is," the same man added as an afterthought, his face twisted in a more lascivious expression than that of the big mouthed Lannister fellow whom he scolded.

"And poor Elder Brother doesn't get a shit of what is going on, his head swimming in the light of the Seven", commented another soldier wearing crimson, a short fat fellow with a very red face, looking as if the gods overlooked him when they were bestowing wits on mortal men.

"The Seven are merciful," drooled the warrior of the Faith, with almost no hair and many name days behind him, mooning over Lady Sansa. "Maybe a faithful soldier may yet rip a reward to wed a widow of Tyrion Lannister, another proclaimed traitor, when the time is right. She requires a lesson in faith."

Gendry's mother worked in an alehouse and she may have been a whore in need, but she was first of all his mother, blond, and kind, and gentle. He still remembered men she would occasionally bring home and he'd never forget the look on their faces. Men who were strong only when called upon to predate on the weak. The lesson the ugly old soldier wanted to give Lady Sansa was not at all about the faith, and Gendry had heard enough.

Swifter than a stag, he ran down from his hideout on the top of the wall, away from the forge and into the armoury. The words of the soldiers echoed in his mind. _The singer… the northerner… her last living brother on the Wall…_ For all Gendry knew, the most likely place Arya would have gone when she ran away from the Brotherhood without Banners would be to see her real brother on the Wall. And if she was still alive, and if the northern singer was a northern outlaw, and if he truly came from the Wall, if he knew her brother, and if Arya still had any fondness left in her heart for her sister, Sansa… If, if, if, if only… He forcefully shut up all the ifs in his mind. There was no time for second thoughts.

 _My father was betrothed to Lyanna Stark,_ thought Gendry. _And if I am his bastard, I may yet be deemed fit to woe m'lady._

"Time to check if blood is thicker than water" _,_ Gendry said to the ghosts of Harrenhal if there were any listening in the armoury.

He picked up the largest warhammer he could find, handling it with ease as if it was lighter than a feather. The soldiers would have captured Mance Rayder by then and Gendry hurried to find the Elder Brother or the hulking monk, hoping he would reach them on time.


	17. The Mistake of Ramsay Bolton

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Rhaegar and Lyanna say good-bye and truly terrible things build up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading.
> 
> Warning for some gore and violence in this one.

**Jaime**

"Good work, wench," said Jaime, "your coming distracted the creature from finding me first."

"I don't know what you mean, my lord," Brienne murmured back, touching a black pendant on her neck. "I came as silent as I could."

Her moments of shyness always surprised him all over again, so genuine as he had never seen them in delicate ladies of the court, whimpering to the touch of the pretty knights in the dark alcoves of the Red Keep.

Yet her reply made the golden eyebrows grow stiff and all his senses turn back to a state of utmost alertness. He moved to where the water had been dripping, minutes, hours ago, half expecting to see another enemy. The silence was empty and peaceful, the cold somewhat less. Behind him, Brienne uncovered Lord Arryn, who seemed to stop shaking. _Small mercies,_ thought Jaime.

"Come out," he spoke to the moving air, "and I may be merciful."

"My lord," the dark air said from behind a rock, and a pile of human misery, flesh and armour, wet and shivering, ugly red hair mixed with snow, slumped at his knees. "I _burned_ another dead man, just like I saw you doing. Than I followed the monster! I followed it into the caves... It was terrible! But I didn't know what else to do, you left me in the tree to die! How could you vanquish that thing? Please don't kill me, please, please..."

Jaime first pulled Ser Shadrich on his feet and then slapped him harshly several times all over his face, for a good measure of his treason.

"You are a piece of shit," he said, "at least try speaking like a man. Why did you take Lord Arryn? How much did Lord Royce pay you?"

"Lord Royce, my lord?" the miserable knight asked, humiliated. "I have never had a pleasure of meeting him."

"Naturally, you'd never meat Bronze John in person, being a lowlife. How much coin did he send you or promise to give you in exchange for the child?"

"Jaime," Brienne said bluntly and the hint of reticence in her voice made him forget everything, the cowardly knight and his own fears. For Jaime was still afraid of the thing that he murdered, despite that it turned into crystal and that he would never admit being scared of it to anyone.

"We should go," she continued, warily. "You can question him later."

"Or do it here and leave him to what's haunting us when we're done," Jaime disagreed.

"Please, my lady, tell him! We travelled together, tell him I'm just a hedge knight honouring my new master!" screamed Ser Shadrich.

"Don't presume to know me to save your hide, ser," she told him, and then to Jaime. "I'm certain that Lord Royce could afford to hire someone more capable if he is truly behind this."

"What would I do without you?" Jaime said with love in his voice, but it came out as a hoarseness in the great hollow hill of the old gods. "This knight is past his best years and works for coppers. Silver stags and golden dragons are beyond his reach. And the greediest man we've been travelling with was his last known master, so..."

Jaime faced Ser Shadrich and bellowed as if he had four hands and not only one, in a voice that would make Lord Tywin sing the Rains of Castamere in his grave, "Tell me the truth if you don't want the Others to take you for real!"

"My lord of Lannister, it was Lord Baelish, he told me to admit it to you only after torture, that Lord Royce paid me three hundred golden dragons! And then Littlefinger would tell y... you to spare my miserable life and pay me five hundred when you got us back!"

Lord Commander of the Kingsguard considered the most fitting manner to execute a double traitor when the winter cold started growing on them again. The water dripping from the cave wall where Ser Shadrich had been hiding hardened into ice before their eyes.

"He's telling the truth," said a newly conscious Robert Aryn in a thin voice. "I was riding two steps behind and I heard everything. It's just that Lord Baelish thinks I am witless and don't understand. But I do."

"Then why not telling anyone, why letting him take you?" Jaime asked in frustration.

"Because I like the old red-haired knight. He's coarse and he beats me but he also teaches me things. Lord Baelish only bedded my mother and then she died. I know it was the singer who killed her out of jealousy, but it doesn't feel right."

"The northern singer?" Brienne asked, puzzled.

"No! He is even better than Ser Shadrich. He tells me stories about people from the north, and great beasts. I am almost a knight now, he says, Mance. And I am! I could have defended myself when I was kidnapped, but there's another reason I did not."

"Please, enlighten us," said Jaime, his irony completely lost on a child who continued earnestly with big adoring eyes.

"Lord Baelish said that Ser Jaime Lannister, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard himself was going to come after me! The first among the seven wearing the white cloak in the Seven Kingdoms! It was the only way you would pay attention to me, small, and sick, and miserable that I am. I know what they're all whispering behind my back," the boy's innocent voice changed and he hissed with vengeance uncanny for one so young, "that I will die before I become a lord. And I know that I will never wed Alayne because she is beautiful and I am a retard. She will have to marry my handsome cousin Harry to inherit the Vale. But, please, my lord, I want so much to take the white. I would squire for you and do anything you ask of me if you would only help me become a knight."

Robert Arryn knelt clumsily, and tried as hard as he could not too shake, his underdeveloped muscles and bones a witness to his incurable condition.

"Lord Arryn," Brienne said in all seriousness and it had a better effect on the child than anything an awestruck Jaime could have done. "You saved a maiden today, that is a good start. But now we must leave."

The boy let her lead him away gently, as if she'd been his mother, groping unconsciously for one of Brienne's breasts as he went. Ser Shadrich limped after them, shivering like a leaf, and Jaime was last, sensing that the terror of the cold was closing in behind them, looking for _him,_ just like it wanted _him_ first under the white throne.

 _I was only a few years older than the little lord when I took the white,_ he remembered, pitying the boy. Ugly as it was, what people talked about him was probably the truth. It was unlikely he'd survive long enough to become a proper lord. Maybe the child did not deserve to know that, but it found out. And there was no way of putting it back.

 _Gentle birth cannot restore one's health_ , Jaime thought, remembering Tyrion, his brother, who would be the Lord of Casterly Rock, if they all shared a more loving father, or if the gods did not make him a dwarf.

The wailing of the dead and the thuds of steps, or hoofbeats, could be heard behind them, no one could tell how far, or how echoes came from all directions in the openness and from the deep holes the water delved in rocks in the dark places under ground. A stroll back through the caves turned into hapless run to reach the narrowest tunnel, leading out, into the sun, and the lands still protected by the change of seasons.

Jaime had no answers for why the white walkers would want him. At the end of the pass, where it was slanting upwards, someone tossed them a rope, and before they knew it, they were all out, safe and sound, and alive for another day.

Jaime's squires approached him with his white armour and a golden hand. The horses they had before falling in the trap of the old gods grazed peacefully at the side of the path. Everything was as he imagined it to be when he had touched the hiltless dagger first in the dankness of the caves.

 _Maybe it can sing and foretell the future,_ thought Jaime observing the blade with distrust.

But the Valyrian steel only shined like an immaculate colourful mirror in which he could see the answers he already had in his mind without further questioning Ser Shadrich.

"I'm an idiot. My father must be turning in his grave for having such a son," he said. "I ordered Ser Daven to kill the singer and anyone else who might make trouble on the way back to the capital, and to accept the wisdom of Lord Baelish on what trouble was."

He found that he could not stand Brienne's piercing regard, hurt and unbelieving, but he nonetheless carried on.

"Baelish sent me away so that he can kill them all."

"He thought I'd kill Ser Shadrich without thinking twice, you know, it's the Kingslayer's reputation. And if I found out the truth, I would never be back on time. Not before he's done with his plans."

"We ride back!" he said to Brienne in a voice that brought no disagreement. "Monk, you will lead the children on foot and I will send horses to bring you back as soon as I can."

"Lord Arryn," he told the boy, not understanding his own reasons for speaking. "You are the only high lord among them and you will give them your protection. Ser Shadrich is under your command."

"He is not," interrupted the boy with purple eyes. "I mean, he's not the only one, ser. I am Edric Dayne, heir to Starfall."

"Lord Dayne," Jaime acknowledged another infant lord feeling as old as the Crone. _These brats only miss Arya Stark to found a company of children sellswords._ He laughed at his senseless thought.

"And you," he said to the petrified hedge knight awaiting his destiny, "do your best to keep everyone safe until then and don't expect any pay for it. If you don't, there will be no hiding place big enough in the Seven Kingdoms for you to cower from my reprisal."

**Robert Baratheon's son**

Gendry couldn't see the Elder Brother, but the bald soldier of the Faith who would teach Lady Sansa lessons was carelessly making water next to the barracks after the capture of the northern rebel. So he approached him and yelled: "Hey you, do you care to go whoring with me tonight?"

"Gods bless you, no, my son," the man said, first tucking his member in, then piously making the sign of the Seven. "They bring an honest man to his ruin."

Gendry rolled his sleeves all the way up to his shoulders as he would do when he worked in the forge. He took a good swing of his hammer and broke the man's nose, turning it into a bloody mess, experiencing profound satisfaction at his achievement.

"That was for offending my mother," he said. "And now you will tell me where you keep the prisoner, or the next blow will smash your head."

The man made a step back trying to stop the bleeding with one hand, unsuccessfully, Gendry noted with joy, and looked in the direction where the bastard had been pointing with the other hand.

A small door could be seen in the castle walls, behind the wooden dais where a henchman's block already stood, clean and ready, waiting for its next visitor.

**Sandor**

Gendry rushed into them before they could reach the castle's gate.

Sandor Clegane and the Elder Brother walked back slowly leading the horses, six of them in total. Gendry lifted the hammer, smeared with fresh blood, and nearly hit the Elder Brother in his eagerness to speak. The Hound watched with amusement how the older man recoiled as if he had seen a real ghost in Harrenhal. A prudent move, for the hammer was heavy, and the boy strong and not trained in its usage.

"Boy, it's me you will kill with that hammer of yours if we ever finish the silly play. You should still grow a bit to reach out to me easier, though," Sandor Clegane said, measuring the lad, more than a head shorter than him still, almost forgetting his foreboding of danger waiting for them all in Harrenhal. A minute too soon as the boy's words showed.

"They got Mance in the dungeons," Gendry panted from exertion. "Baelish does. He thinks he's the king of some outlaws up north, working with Lady Sansa's brother, and both traitors to the realm. He means to have Mance killed and hurt Lady Sansa."

One giant leg of the Hound was already in the stirrup, ready to mount Stranger and storm into the castle, when the Elder Brother pulled him back. His cowl dropped. He wore no helm, and he looked like he had just walked over his mother's grave, but his words were kind as ever, the usual calmness of his dark eyes laced with something... different? The Hound wondered if the former hedge knight just came back to life in his unlikely saviour on the Trident and if the old monk could finally accept the world for what it was, made by killers, decided by killers.

"Brother," the Elder Brother said, "you go calmly and get the lady. With some luck she is still in her rooms. Kill only if you must."

Sandor could hardly believe his ears about the last sentence he was told, but there was more to come.

"Don't leave her alone. Try and create some distraction in the castle, anything you can think about. Break the kitchen pots, release all the horses, beat up someone for all I care. Meanwhile I will ask to see the prisoner. The soldiers calling themselves of the Faith cannot refuse him the last blessing of the Seven before he loses his life of a traitor, no matter what crimes he's accused of committing. Gendry, come with me, and keep your hammer down for a while. It _is_ a deadly weapon as Prince Rhaegar could have told you..."

Sandor rode back as calm as he could, checking on a dog shaped helm in his saddle bag. _Still there,_ he thought. _Good._ It was past time for the real Hound to make his new entrance to the sorry mummery of his pitiful life, and kill everyone who thought him craven for a good start.

He tethered Stranger as close as he could to the Kingspyre Tower and ran up the stairs in enormous strides, taking them four by four to reach the room of the little bird. The door was barred and he let out a sigh of relief, knocking on it gently with huge hands.

"It's me," he rasped and was rewarded by the clicking sound. Soon she was before him, lovely and flushed, the mummers' crown of flowers he gave her carefully preserved on her untouched bedding.

"What is it, m-"

"Still no lord, remember," he cut her short but there was no resentment in his voice. "There's trouble. Littlefinger thinks the singer is the King-beyond-the-Wall. Have you ever heard of Mance Rayder? And even if he isn't, he means to kill him and take you back under his wing."

He saw how her good mood dwindled and wanted to give her hope he didn't feel. He lost all hope long ago.

"Come" he said, "no good being inside. Let's see what's going on. The Elder Brother wants me to make a distraction and he will see the prisoner if he can, to see what can be done."

"Distraction," she held him to that one word of all. Her pretty eyes widened. "Maybe I can help. Wait."

She wore her hair up in a mockery of the elaborate southern style, tied only so much that it wouldn't hinder her movements for the false tourney they made. The large auburn gleaming knot almost fell apart when she bent to retrieve something from under the bed. A breastplate, black and precious, the Hound noticed, as only the best smith in the Seven Kingdoms could have made it.

"Can we still catch up with the Elder Brother?" she asked.

And they did. The soldiers were looking at the gathering of all four of them in the yard with watchful eyes, but whatever orders they had, no one dared to approach them just yet. They may have looked menacing enough, but the Hound knew one thing very well. In a real battle, mere appearance would not bring them victory.

Both monks still wore a patched armour from the play. A frightening greatsword in an ornate scabbard attached to the Hound's back was in plain sight, and the snarling dog helm covered all of his face, the dog's head hidden by a monk's cowl. Gendry held his hammer with great pride, and the Elder Brother occasionally caressed the blunt tourney lance, leaning on it like an old man to his walking stick, bare-faced and thoughtful.

Sansa said to them in soft voice so that the lurking soldiers would not hear, pink as if she had just been scrubbed clean in bath by her maids: "Gendry, go among the soldiers and shout that the lady might show her c... what men visit the brothels for. That she may do it in the godswood, please. Did you understand?"

"I was born in Flea Bottom, m'lady. I can call a cunt by its name," said Gendry. "But by R'hllor, how could that help?

"Just announce it, please," said a purple glowing Sansa and made a deep courtesy in front of the leader of the monks, as if she was asking for his blessing. When the Elder Brother passively proceeded with giving one, he was close enough that she could pass him the breastplate under their joined cloaks.

"A sword only cuts through flesh," she said evenly, "but an evil word can cut through the soul. That is what my septa taught me, brother, is that not so?"

"Son," the Elder Brother told Gendry, not changing his facial expression for an inch. "We will obey the lady in all her wishes."

"Elder Brother," the Hound called out then, pointing at the map of the dungeons he drew in the dry mud with his boots while Sansa did her talking. It was all he could do to stop imagining the little bird's cunt, a sick dog that he was. He pointedly hit the exit he made in the walls hard with his heel, ruining the plan made of sand as soon the former soldier hidden in the high servant of the Faith observed it, and made an approving nod.

Sandor Clegane was then taken by the hand.

He was being led away like a small confused boy, clanking as he went, too heavy in an ill-fitting armour, and _worried_ about the outcome of the imminent clash.

 _Worried? When was I worried?_ he thought. _Admit it,_ an inner voice said, _ever since they killed her father and you knew they were going to come after her in one way or another. You've always been worried and you have done nothing._

The godswood was bigger than he could imagine it that far south in a black fortress ruined by dragon fire. The leaves of the weirwood rustled red and lush, undisturbed by any wind in the quietness of the afternoon. There was not a single soul to be seen except the two of them.

Sansa brought him in front of the heart tree, close to a stump of another giant weirwood. The flatness where the tree was cut gaped full of red lines of the blood of the earth, fresh, not scarred yet, one for every year of undisturbed life until the mighty old tree fell victim to a new enemy. A man and his hungry axe.

He had no idea what she wanted, until she got her white mask out of her pocket and he finally understood.

"You think people will come and watch us again? To listen to your chirping and my _gallant_ remarks? They'd all run away if they knew who I was."

"I suspect my Aunt Lyanna said farewell to Prince Rhaegar after the tourney," Sansa said, serious as a statue of Baelor the Blessed in front of his Sept in King's Landing, where all those years ago her father had lost his head.

 _"_ Godswood would be a good place for a secret meeting. No one ever went to pray to the old goods when I stayed in the capital, no one but myself and a drunken fool," she said with bitterness Sandor could not understand, hating her for calling him a drunken fool, even if that was what he was. A fool. Only the drink was gone and there was no other remedy in the realm to make his existence more bearable.

"I imagine King Aerys's court was no different," she concluded.

"We don't have a parchment-" Sandor Clegane tried to say, resisting her.

"-You didn't need one in the firepit when we faced the Brotherhood without Banners. I _know_ you didn't read then, or listened to the prompting. You spoke your mind! And it worked! To know that my father never wanted to betray her, true or not, has broken the monster that my mother has become. You made it sound true and that was the most important. Why are these people any different?"

The Hound lost and she knew it when she pleaded: "It is only for a short time... Even if the singer is what they say he is, a wildling and a traitor, he was good to us for a time being. We owe him this kindness in return..."

They had to stop yelling because three serving women approached with empty water jugs, and silently sat in the grass next to the first tree in the grove framing one dead and one living weirwood. They giggled like girls. The Hound tried to think of what he could say as a farewell if he had been a handsome silver-haired prince taking leave of a warrior maiden. His head was empty for he was a miserable ugly bastard and no one would bother if he lived or died. _The Elder Brother might,_ a strange thought came to him, _but only because of his endless faith. Not because he cared for a maimed dog._

The Hound turned away from Sansa. Only to witness the people gathering. More and more soldiers came, from both Ser Daven, and Ser Bonifer. A cow mooed behind, from a commoner too cautious to leave it in the scarce pastures of Harrenhal, so it also came to watch the show. _Mummery it is,_ he thought. _If they want more lies, that is what they will get._

The cries could be heard from afar: "Mummery! Mummery in the godswood!"

Whatever Gendry heralded to the people, it has worked miracles in terms of distraction.

The place for prayers to the trees in Harrenhal, inhabited only by the winds since the abandon of the old gods in the south, was more packed than ever in its long past. Planted in Dawn Age, at the beginning of times when the children of the forest still walked alone, not hindered by the First Men, the godswood was so full that it could not harbour another mortal soul. Eyes peered among the trees, legs stood still and arms were folded in front of many different chests heaving in expectation. The community held its joint breath and waited for the show, not daring to break the heavy silence with a single cough. The calm was thick and demanding when Sandor finally dared to look at Sansa, who sat carefully on the large weirwood stump, wiggling her bare feet in the air, the slightly raised skirts revealing perfect white ankles that never walked in the fields, never touched the harsh ground or stone.

Her boots were discarded in front of the heart tree and despite showing it earlier, she wore no mask. She held a branch of red leaves in her hand, and he felt compelled to approach her.

Sandor Clegane was glad for a visor of his own helm, and the monk's cowl on top of it. It was a bit too warm in it all, but the face he wore was not the one he'd wish anyone to see. The face of a monster in love.

"My prince," she spoke evenly, a bird well trained, her voice balanced like the night after the Tourney of the Hand when she put all that Gregor was to rest in only two sentences and nine true words. _No one could withstand him and he was no true knight_ , she had said. And Sandor Clegane knew that he was never going to be able to forget her. "If I make a request of you, will you honour it?" she asked from a weirwood throne different than her mother's. Majestic. Kind.

"As my lady commands," he rattled the empty courtesy as if he'd been a parrot from the Summer Isles for a change.

"We are not free to do as we please. You are married to a most kind and beautiful woman and I am betrothed to a good man. I begin to know you now, my prince, and see that you, as well as I, will want to hold true to your word."

"As my lady says," he said back, his head empty of all words, true or false, making a step closer to the centre of his world, twiddling her pale feet in the crispy air of the early afternoon.

"We will do our duty," she said. "But this one thing we may allow us, to say farewell in all honesty. What do you say?"

He approached her, mute as a rock, only a step away. He said, not knowing where the words had come from. "I do not wish this to be our farewell."

"Neither do I," she replied, "but it is so, nevertheless. Come!"

Sansa stood up on the trunk of the white tree when he obeyed her and stepped all the way forward, acutely aware of the ruin of his scars which could never be hidden enough from the world. He instinctively turned them to face the heart tree and away from the curious eyes, forgetting they were under the helm, and the hood. Sansa was a good head taller than him then, and that was out of the ordinary.

"Before I leave, and return to the north, I wish you to know, beyond any doubt, of what could have been. Consider it a parting gift, offered against my better judgement."

No one could prepare the Hound for what had happened then.

Sansa pulled the visor of his helm up, with fingers used to helping brothers and cousins, and the gods knew who else out of their armour. At the same time, a torrent of red hair was released, showering his face in its entirety, hiding it from view, covering it better than his own lank black hair ever could. The snarling dog receded under the monk's cowl just far enough that his entire face was bare, but only to Sansa. She grasped his neck with one hand, as if looking for direction, and without any hesitation, revulsion or flinching, pressed her lips to his.

All the words came back to Sandor Clegane then, but they couldn't leave his mouth. Not at that moment for it was invaded in a sweetest way. He even forgot to check if she was looking at him, or closed her eyes, his obsession that she _should_ look at him irreparably lost in that moment. His hands found her body and held her close.

 _You started this,_ he thought. _And a dog will bite if tempted for too long._

He kissed her like he never kissed anyone, hungry and desperate, waiting for her to stop the madness, to realise what they were doing, that people were watching...

But she'd have none of that. It was she who bit him first, on the scarred part of his lips, leaving her mark on his flesh, gentle, but unyielding, and the Hound could understand very well why Baelish wanted to kill them all to get back what he almost lost.

Sandor Clegane would destroy a kingdom, just like Rhaegar did, if only he could have her all for himself. The scraps from his masters' table would never be enough when it came to Sansa Stark.

He wished she would kiss his scars, and not only his lips, imagining that he could sense it, knowing he could not. It would be a monstrous thing to ask anyone to touch _that._ He wished she would love him, and hated himself for all his wishes.

The thing was, he didn't deserve her, and the other men had already taken her before she could even learn to look at his face.

So he sank to his knees and buried his head in her stomach in despair, hiding his face completely, gripping her waist to savour the miracle while it lasted.

"I burn for you," he said, "and it burns me to know that you will never, never be mine."

Leaving her lips in peace was like coming down from the clouds. There were one too many soldiers in the castle for two men and a boy to outsmart them or defeat them. Corbray and Blackwood could not be trusted, and revealing himself to Daven was a last resort idea, and not a particularly good one at that.

The Hound knew he could not just _leave_ Sansa to Baelish and walk away. He had already left her once.

So he had to say, never showing his face, hoping she'd understand: "If I am not there for you, and you need help at court, trust Ser Arthur above all others, above your _father_. He may come out for you even when it seems unlikely. Not because of me, but because he is not a bad man."

"But what harm could befall the crown prince in his own court, I do not understand," she said, sounding differently than ever before, serious, sad, but not afraid, not afraid of him...

"Ser Arthur may not seem it, but he's the best of them all," he insisted and saw she finally understood.

 _If I die today, the only one who may protect you from Baelish is Jaime,_ he wished to tell her in plain Common Tongue, but he could not.

The terror of his helm and the monk's hood were placed back on his head, more gently than ever, and he couldn't remember how he stood up. He couldn't remember how he helped her put her boots back on.

He'd always remember how the brave soldiers cried liked small children instead of cheering when the mummery ended.

The washerwoman eager to see men as gods made them, stood in a first row, unable to part her eyes from the couple in front of the heart tree, smelling a half dried yellow flower in her right hand, using the left one to dry a single tear.

**Jaime**

"What if Lady Sansa makes trouble?" Brienne asked, sullen, glaring at Jaime from her steed, when they had left the others far behind. Her words were filled with contempt the courtiers used, ever since he stabbed Aerys, to gossip behind his back. But only the sapphire lady had the courage to shove it in his face since he was still a lice-infested prisoner of Lady Catelyn Stark.

Jaime had to smile.

"I admitted to being an idiot, _in front_ of Ser Shadrich," he said, "but not a complete fool".

A pair of blue eyes waited for him to continue, still angry with him as seven hells.

"Must be there's something of my father in me anyways. I didn't doubt Baelish for a second when he tricked me to order Daven to kill the singer if necessary. That was his win. I had no idea. But when Littlefinger left us, I told Daven to keep Lady Sansa, Elder Brother and Brother Gravedigger safe and sound until I returned, and I specified that safe meant he should leave neither of the three alone in custody of Littlefinger or any of his soldiers if he valued his life."

Jaime thoroughly enjoyed how Brienne's shoulders were not tense anymore. Almost riding her down to come close enough, he squeezed his legs tight not to fall out of the saddle, and moved a short strand of very light bristle hair out of her eyes.

"There," he said, "it suits you better, my lady"

After riding for some time, she seemed almost at ease with him again.

"Ser Daven does not know that Brother Gravedigger is the Hound, does he?" she asked, carefully.

"Sandor wanted it that way. He was never very open minded with people if you get my meaning. I let him be."

"You call him by his first name. Is it because he was the servant of your family?"

"I call you by your first name. Do you feel like my servant?" he asked her, accusingly.

"No", she said, honest as ever. "More like your friend. But high lords do not befriend ladies."

"Well, lads befriend wenches, I'd say. And you got me there. Sandor and very few others came as close as possible to being friends of mine in Casterly Rock. Almost friends, mind you, for I was the lord's eldest get, so I had none."

 _Only a secret too precious to behold, too dark to reveal, and too sweet to live by anything else,_ he told himself in his mind, cursing his weakness, and thinking of his sister.

"You spoke almost like a commoner, now," she observed.

"I did," he answered, "I used to do it a lot when I was a boy with the soldiers in the household. It angered my father, but it made my brother laugh."

"It fits you," she said, embarrassed for saying something like that at all.

"Brienne, you wound me," he jested, whistling merrily a few lines from the ' _Bear and the Maiden Fair_ '. "You know what a commoner as strong as me would have done to a big wench like you, don't you, by now?"

She was redder than the crimson of Cersei's wedding gown, and Jaime, more than ever, felt like a man.

"Where do you think Baelish will make his move?" Brienne asked when she managed to speak again.

"In Harrenhal," Jaime said, his forehead suddenly wrinkled like a sky filling up with clouds before the rain. "And the gods only know what poor Daven will make out of my confused and contradictory commands. We should better make haste.

**Robert Baratheon's son**

Gendry leaned on his hammer next to the dais that once contained a gibbet, trying to keep calm. The Elder Brother and the Lady Sansa were not there, which was not a bad sign in itself. The hulking monk faced him, all the way on the other side of the wooden dais where Mance Rayder, the King-beyond-the-Wall, as Gendry finally learned the correct title, was to take a last walk of his life.

The prisoner came out, wearing a black tunic and his odd black and white cloak. One of his eyes was black, and his trousers cut open on several places. His hands were tied with hempen rope and he walked meekly, a tangle of hair, dark and grey, framing the face of one resigned to his fate.

He was supposed to have run away, and him being there, that was a bad sign.

Littlefinger stepped forward and spoke in his lordly voice, stern and fake, but the corners of his eyes were singing with joy.

"In the name of His Grace King Tommen of House Lannister and Baratheon, First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, by the word of Petyr, of House Baelish, Lord Paramount of the Trident and Lord Protector of the Vale, I sentence you to die."

"Behold the demise of Mance Rayder, a wildling and a traitor, presuming to call himself _King-_ beyond-the-Wall," the kind lordly voice continued, proclaiming the end of the horrors all in the south recalled when the legendary enemy was mentioned.

Old women said Mance Rayder ate children for breakfast, or drank blood of the captured men of the Night's Watch. Strong men believed that an army of Wildlings would descend upon the peaceful villages of the Seven Kingdoms and kill everyone in their sleep if the Night's Watch was not careful. For it was widely known that the men north of the Wall observed no gods, no laws, and only lived to commit murder and plunder, and be killed in return. They were animals. They were not people.

"Did you presume I would not know?" Lord Baelish asked, triumphant. "I suspected you from the first day, _Mance._ I lured you here where I could be sure to bring you to justice with the help of the Lady Sansa. Didn't you find it suspicious that she wanted to come to Harrenhal in support of my plans? My Alayne has been working with me all along!"

Baelish searched the crowd, but just like Gendry, he could not see the lady. _That is already better,_ thought Gendry, taking what hope he could, staring at the round attentive faces of the soldiers and smallfolk, and seeing how they were all afraid.

It was late in the afternoon and they wanted to see the blood of the singer whose verses they applauded in the morning.

They would cheer for Littlefinger now, they would bow to anyone who would promise to alleviate their fears, not asking too many questions of their new lord and master. The peasants prayed to plant one more crop, before the winter or another army take it. The soldiers yearned for a truce, to receive payment for their services, to waste them on cheap pleasures until their liege lords would call the banners again.

Ser Daven handed Lord Baelish the sword.

"Oh, I could not," Littlefinger excused himself, showing the empty sleeve under his expensive doublet, embroidered with gold. "Ser Daven, would you do me the honour, or name the executioner of your own choosing. Let's get this over with."

Ser Daven obliged and walked to the block, motioning to his soldiers to bring forth the prisoner. Before they could obey, the wildling walked himself in measured steps to the piece of wood, oak, or birch, Gendry thought. It was dull brown, not white, not a white tree of the north.

 _The death from the south for a man from the north,_ Gendry felt sick, observing the prisoner bending slowly.

But instead of kneeling next to the block the King-beyond-the-Wall lowered his torn trousers and stepped out of them. With ease, he tossed them carelessly down from the dais where he was to be beheaded, deep into the yellow mud. The non-kingly gesture revealed a long strap of scarred flesh on both legs, in a straight line from his buttocks to his heels. The barely healed injuries pierced the eye, bright red and horribly regular, executed with the precision only human cruelty could muster. He made sure that Lord Baelish would see the old wounds before he approached the block and knelt, not putting the head down, yet.

Mance spoke just as he looked: dark wings, and even darker words. "I heard it was customary among you, kneelers, for a prisoner to stand trial, or at least for a man sentenced to die to be allowed to speak before his beheading is carried out. Do you not respect your own laws?"

"Do you deny that you are Mance Rayder, the King-beyond-the-Wall, whose head is forfeit in the Seven Kingdoms?" asked Ser Daven, politely.

"Aye, I am Mance Rayder," the prisoner replied. "But I never called myself King-beyond-the-Wall nor have my people ever called me that. It is the names you _kneelers_ gave me. How can I be at fault over a name invented by others? Is being given a name by folk I have never met a breach of your southern laws? If I call you Kings-beyond-the-Gallows, my lords, will your lives be forfeit among my people, beyond the Wall?"

"His people!" Baelish snorted. "You presume to talk of your people as if you were a king and not a pretender, an impostor and a murderer!"

"An impostor and a murderer!" Mance echoed. "Choice words, my lord, for one as honourable as you."

"Ser Daven, bring us his head!" Baelish tried to speak as King Joffrey did when he ordered the head of Lord Eddard Stark, but Harrenhal was not King's Landing and his attempt did not stop the prisoner from talking.

"I was no king," Mance said. "But I had a people. They called me Mance for that is my name. And they didn't follow the title you invented for me in the south. They followed me. The man."

"Are you quite done speaking?" asked Lord Baelish, impatient, his eyes twinkling with a sureness of the impending victory.

"Only my last words, a question, to Lord Baelish, Ser Daven, if I may."

The blond curly knight nodded, unable to resist the courtesy he was offered, and the wildling spoke in a voice sharper than steel.

"Tell me, Lord Baelish, what was the only mistake Ramsay Bolton ever made?"

"Ramsay Snow may have made a mistake or two in his youth, regrettable things, yes, and understandable given his age. But since he was legitimized by the rightful king, Ser Ramsay Bolton, Lord of Winterfell, and lawful son to Roose Bolton, Lord of Dreadfort and the Warden of the North, made none!" dictated Baelish, self-assured as if he had still been the king's councillor in King's Landing.

"Oh, but he did," Mance said simply, "he didn't kill _me_ when he had a chance."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you once again to everyone who bothered to comment. With so many stories around, it is amazing that people take the time :-)
> 
> The next update may be in a while and it will be the most violent chapter of this story yet, I will repeat the warnings when I manage to publish it.


	18. The Cloak of Cloaks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where we find out what has happened to Mance Rayder in Winterfell and it's not pretty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for violence, gore, and Boltons. Take it seriously with this chapter.
> 
> Am rather anxious about publishing it at all so please be kind.

**Robert Baratheon's son**

Still wearing his cloak, Mance knelt closer to the executioner's block, turning his back on Ser Daven, by word of m'lord Baelish his headsman for that day.

He put his cheek on a stained wood and stared forward evenly with murky brown eyes, neither cocky, nor craven, a soul who had made his peace.

The dark hood of the cloak concealed the path the sword would have to cross towards his neck, crumpled under his unruly hair, but the thick black wool in-wrought with thin red threads was no threat to Ser Daven's shiny steel, which would soon cut through it like through butter, sweeping away the cloak and the man, for good.

The dirty looking large white surface of the cloak, adorned with white and grey furs on its hem, hung harsh and unbending on both sides of the block, leaving the ugly red skin on the prisoner's lower legs bare for all too see. His feet were dirty and so very white, as if they had never seen the sun.

 _As probably they did not, in the great vastness of the north,_ thought Gendry, horrified with the offender's silent bravery. The little he learned about it in King's Landing, and from Yoren, when they headed for the Wall, spoke of an inhospitable barren land, not fit for human dwelling. _As if the Flea Bottom was any better,_ he considered. _North or south, for the commoners it is all the same. We die by the sword._

"Take off his cloak first, I want to see his neck!" commanded Littlefinger, sounding full of terrible suspicion, but a peaceful deep voice opposed him, reaching the ears of the people like rain falling on the parched lands in the heat of the long summer, or a delicate ointment soothing a grievous wound.

"To humiliate a man sentenced to lose his life is a great sin against the will of the Seven," said the Elder Brother who somehow appeared behind Gendry's back with Lady Sansa on his arm. "His death will be punishment enough. Let us rather pray for him to the gods in our hearts, as is good and proper."

Ser Daven took the stance to carry out the sentence, and Littlefinger, for once, had nothing more to say, impatiently tugging on his goatee.

The sword swung, singing its bloody song of many winters.

And hit only strong metal where there should have been softness of nerves and skin, with a resounding clang.

**Mance**

"And now, my lords, we're going to talk some more," said Mance Rayder, accomplished, holding Ser Daven's head backward to the block by his hair, the knight's own sword pressed sharply against his naked throat. Blond curls gave Ser Daven an innocent youthful look, but his blue-green eyes were of age, and they waited calmly to die, just like Mance's, moments ago.

When the Elder Brother came to see him in the dungeons and told him to run through the hidden exit, Mance refused. There was nowhere he could go without his horse. Patience was in the stables, guarded by the soldiers, and in the low hills around Harrenhal a lone man running would be like a single hare trying to outrun a pack of wolves. There would be no way he could reach King's Landing.

"Kill him! Archers!" Littlefinger shouted orders to Ser Bonifer who only shook his head, calling the more hot-headed soldiers from his garrison to stand down with a practised gesture of his arm.

The Lannister soldiers did not move a single finger, and the confused smallfolk gaped and mutely witnessed how the much wanted execution was delayed.

"He's a Lannister, my lord," said Ser Bonifer, as if that explained everything. "You've been in the Vale for too long. You wouldn't know how Lord Tywin punished the brave companion who cut Ser Jaime's hand. Nor how Ser Jaime threatened Lord Edmure Tully with launching his infant son into the walls of Riverrun if he didn't surrender that castle. There is no hurry here. We should parley for Ser Daven's release."

"Apprehend the monk then! He is in league with Mance Rayder since the Quiet Isle!" Littlefinger tried instead.

"Seven bless your soul, Lord Baelish, I had no idea who this man was until today," retorted the Elder Brother in unfeigned sincerity. "And you apparently did. Does that make you his accomplice?"

A bald elderly soldier with large bandage all over his face pointed accusingly at the Elder Brother and Gendry, bellowing from the last line of Ser Bonifer's garrison: "The boy threatened to smash my head with a warhammer if I didn't tell him where the prisoner was! Then this _monk_ ventured into the dungeons to see him, wearing armour, and exited only wearing his cloak!"

"M'lord," Gendry turned to Baelish, doing his best to sound like an oaf, Mance noted with interest.

 _No, they are not helping me. I have to get through this on my own,_ he thought, gathering his courage, when Robert's bastard continued, "Ye know what m' mother did best of all. This man told whores were no good, so I lost me temper and broke his nose, is all. I'm a smith, I work with hammer. I also heard him say the Lady Sansa was a bitch and that he'd be willing to do a great favour to the realm by bedding her and teaching her lessons in faith."

Littlefinger's face turned from sallow to green, "Good soldier, have you ever _mentioned_ the Lady Sansa?"

"The part about the lessons, aye, but-" the man's face glowed all too clearly with lust and the next call for archers Lord Baelish uttered was the first one that they answered without hesitation. A corpse feathered with many arrows hit the ground. No one bothered to remove it, and Mance Rayder was glad he could finally continue with what he had in mind.

It was time to teach the kneelers a lesson about the North.

"I am sorry, Ser Daven, for what a word of a wildling is worth," he told his captive gently, a hollow forming in his stomach from what he was about to do. "But not even I could fathom that Lord Baelish would choose you to be my executioner so that he can have the good soldiers kill us both, in appearance by chance, if I tried anything foolish as I was bound to do."

Mance Rayder sat on the young man's stomach to press down his body and both arms with his superior weight, never removing the sword from his throat. The King of the Wildlings unsheathed a small knife he wore hidden in his smallclothes with the help of his left hand and his teeth. It was a harmless weapon, at a glance, yet oddly shaped and curved. He directed it towards the nose of a handsome young knight under him.

And clumsily peeled a small string of skin from the side of his nose with the knife, separating it from the flesh and bone meticulously slowly, while Ser Daven writhed, and meowed, and screamed, and finally cried like a baby.

"Cut it!" he whimpered. "Take it, please! It's too much pain…"

The murmur of fear and disapproval passed through the crowd witnessing the scene in disbelief, seeing how it was all truth and the Wildlings more bloodthirsty than all the songs and the tales.

"A parley, Ser Bonifer!" Mance said in an insane voice. "Here are my terms. You let me say whatever I want and speak for as long as I want, and I will let him go. If after I am done, all of you still believe I deserve death, so be it! All of you except Lord Petyr Baelish! I claim that he is not fit to judge me, lord of this castle or not! Best gag him so that he doesn't interrupt me all the time with his silky tongue."

Mance sat on the dais, his back towards the wall of the tower, dragging Ser Daven to half sit, half lay in front of him, supporting his wounded body with his own to ease his pain, and also making a living shield out of him against any attack the kneelers could think of. He could still feel the bile rising high up in his throat from what he did.

Ser Daven's face was like a bright red flower in a field of yellow wheat. The knight's sword lay flat over his belly and the wildling holding him was crushed and diminished by his own actions. The odd cloak opened slightly at his chest, showing a dull black breast plate, and other pieces of the mismatched armour he donned on his upper body with great haste.

"And in what shape will you leave Ser Daven?" Ser Bonifer asked in indignation. "Gutted like a pig?"

"Take it…" Ser Daven moaned. "I don't need a nose…"

A soldier fainted in the first row like a proper lady.

"He'll live," Mance said with the coldness he did not feel. "Which is more than many others in the North can say who have suffered the same fate."

"You have to let him be treated, at least," pleaded Ser Bonifer. "What you did was inhuman! Who's the best healer among you monks?"

More hands pointed at the Elder Brother, who had helped many a man, woman and child since he left the Quiet Isle.

"Lord Baelish, do you object?" Ser Bonifer asked.

His gagged lordship did not make so much as a grunt, for a group of Lannister soldiers already took Mance's words at face value, loyal to their lord. So the Elder Brother climbed up the dais, and to Mance's growing surprise called Brother Gravedigger to come up and help him.

 _Do they pity me?_ he thought. _After I deceived them all about who I was and ignored the kind offer to run with my life?_

"Another thing," said Mance, wishing to try the ice, pointing at Gendry. "You, boy, get all the bows and the arrows and pile them up over here. That is my condition to let him be treated. I will not get myself shot down like a raven for showing mercy."

When the collection was done, Gendry stepped down again and stood next to Sansa, who offered Mance an unreadable pungent look. He didn't know what to think. _Are they all in league with Baelish? Is that the way of the South and the lies she warned me about?_ He returned her a glare worthy of a savage, full of galloping doubts.

Mance surrendered Ser Daven to the monks and paced the dais behind them alongside the tower wall, cowering in their shadow, not in fear, but to hide his maiden nerves. The right words would not come and he was not certain at all about how to achieve what he wanted.

When he finally came forward and faced them all, a dagger was thrown in his direction and he avoided it with ease, an unforced smile popping at his lips.

"I am a wildling and my name is Mance Rayder," he told them. "Those are the only truths you have learned about me from Lord Baelish. And if that is not enough I'm wearing half of your kneelers' armour, and a cloak hiding the movements of my body. You can try throwing steel at me, but the only likely consequence of it will be that you will lose your weapon."

"Where should I begin? How should I begin?" he wondered at the wind and at the clouds, making long strides up and down the dais. "How do I make you see what I have seen and understand why I may yet deserve to live?"

"I came down from the Wall dressed up as a bard, with six spearwives," he paused, almost breaking apart when he spoke of them to the multitude of strangers in Harrenhal, unworthy of their memory.

"They trusted me and followed my lead, but they were more than that. They were my companions," he had to force himself to continue. "We came to Winterfell to rescue a girl, married against her will to one Ramsay Bolton, a bastard of one of your southron lords, Roose Bolton."

"The Lord of Leeches!" shouted a baker from Harrenhal. "He scared us all!"

"Same as the Lord of Bones now," Mance said wryly with an odd smile. "Call him as you wish. Baelish here has already recited you all the titles of the Boltons. He knows them better than I. Their sigil is a flayed man. They have a special flavour to war against the Starks and skin them whenever the times allow. But those are the rumours, good people of Harrenhal! The innocent smallfolk will tell you that flaying is a thing of the past, in the kneelers' North, I mean, the North south of the Wall..."

Mance strived to get some air and went on, serious as a corpse: "So I descended with six spearwives all the way to Winterfell to rescue a girl. All the lords of the North gathered in Winterfell for Ramsay's wedding, in awe and in fear of him and his father. An insane looking youth with white hair of an old man, delivered him a bride in the godswood, dressed in white and grey. Ramsay called him his Reek when his guests would not hear. This Reek had a kraken embroidered on his chest, and he named the bride Arya Stark, for all to hear."

Lady Sansa's wail could be heard all over the black towers of Harrenhal, and she clutched Gendry to stay on her feet, but the boy was no support, leaning on her in equal part, his distress almost greater than hers.

"Take heart, my lady," Mance hurried to explain. "I said he called her that, but that girl wasn't Arya."

The King-beyond-the-Wall shot a black look at Baelish, who didn't move a muscle at his admission, before he went on, "But I believed that she was and that was the name of the girl we came to save in Winterfell, the six spearwives and I, at the bidding of her brother, Jon Snow, by the grace of the old gods Lord Commander on the Wall."

"So Ramsay wedded a girl, and bedded her," Mance said, darkly. "In less than a week, she was a ghost, frail and thin, her body full of bruises. He made her lay with dogs, and when the dogs would not obey his wishes, for they were more in tune with nature's desires than Ramsay and his favourite servants, he punished the dogs and he punished her."

"And that was how during the feasts in Winterfell, I sang of Bael the Bard, the wildling who fathered the next Lord of Winterfell many a year ago, and my six helpers posed as servants and whores. They were not very convincing, because they were soldiers equal to men in a different army than you kneelers know, and just like me they were the free folk. For that is who we are, first and above all."

"They were called Rowan, Holly, Frenya, Myrtle, Willow Witch-eye and Squirrel... Some of them got stolen as young girls, and some of them still waited to be stolen. Frenya had a child, she had left him at the Wall. But when it came to fighting, they fought like any man."

"So we watched the girl and her popping bruises. She was guarded day and night and we couldn't think of a safe way to approach her. And, every now and then, when we had a chance, we would kill off Ramsay's most faithful men, one by one. The households of the northern lords who came to the wedding, and to swear fealty to the new _rulers_ of _your_  North, spoke of the ghosts in Winterfell. But the highborn knew better, and started smelling treason among each other. Hostilities filled the air like a smell of flowers in spring, and I knew it was going to come to swords among them soon when someone, other than us, killed a boy, Walder Frey he was called."

The King-beyond-the-Wall became lost, immersed in his recent past, haunting him in his waking state, hard to ignore, impossible to forget.

"I am a wildling," he said. "But I have never and I would never kill a child or a woman who was not a spearwife fighting against me. Or a man who was not a crow or a warrior. Not for vengeance or to gain power in any case. Maybe I'd do it for food, or to steel a woman, or in some stupid fight in wine haze, I cannot say. There is no food enough north of the Wall for all of us who still breathe."

"So I knew that the uneasy peace of Winterfell was nor going to last. I had to act. I had the spearwives approach this boy Reek when the snow started to fall heavily and buried Winterfell under its wing. We worked together and he saved the girl, jumping with her from the castle walls into deep snow."

"Ramsay was mad with loss of not one, but two of his favourite toys, and of his lawful claim to Winterfell, not that he needed one much if you ask me. Ramsay took Winterfell as a wildling could, burning, pillaging, killing. With the difference that he already had a castle or two somewhere else, so he didn't need another one, and most of us wildlings have nothing at all."

"I was captured by the Boltons," Mance said with burning hatred. "At first I accepted it because I did what I had come to do. The girl was freed. Three of my spearwives were killed in her escape and that was, I learned, a small mercy. Ramsay put me in a cage with the surviving three, hanging us high up on a chain stretched between the two towers of Winterfell still standing. He stripped us in tunics and smallclothes, and he took away my old cloak, the black of the Night's Watch, mended with the red threads of the free folk, jesting he would return it to me when I would need a shroud. We huddled together to last the night as it continued to snow."

The voice of the King-beyond-the-Wall lowered in a terrible rasp and all Harrenhal was listening.

"The first day he skinned the three dead spearwives in front of us as if they were dead animals, and covered us with threads of their skin for the night. 'For warmth', he said and he laughed."

"On a second day he flayed one of my surviving friends alive. It took her several hours to die, and she was lucky to die that fast, because the bastard was skilled and would let his victims live as long as possible."

"Our cloak had grown that night and the three of us cried until dawn, pressed against each other."

"On a third day we knew what would happen and I begged him to spare them and skin me instead. He let another spearwife run, making her believe she could escape, only to let his dogs after her, and then he skinned her alive."

"On a fourth day, my last surviving friend refused to run. She sobbed and begged him for mercy, knowing what was to come. She told him things he had never asked for. She told him all our names, that I was the King-beyond-the-Wall, and a friend of Jon Snow. She said I could get him a wildling princess for wife, a much more beautiful woman than the one Ramsay lost, and that I had an infant son."

"Ramsay spent all night flaying the last living one of the six spearwives who came with me to Winterfell."

"He told me it was in payment of his gratitude for all the useful things she had told him."

"And, m'lords, how my cloak has grown, in only four days!" Mance croaked with unseeing eyes blinded with tears, pulling his hair out, incoherent and wild. "Warm and lined with blood!"

He sank to the ground, forefront on the dais, and grabbed his head between his hands in horror of remembrance, forgetting to shield himself completely. Anyone could have killed him then and there but no one made a move to touch the sword. The quietness in Harrenhal grew deeper than on the inside of a tomb untouched for centuries.

"Continue, my lord," the voice of Lady Sansa trembled, sailing over the silence, "remember, you still have to go to Oldtown, where you may find your heart."

"On a fifth day" Mance managed finally, regaining some of his composure. The worst part was told, and the rest came easier. "Ramsay wrote a letter to Jon Snow, saying what he did and where he had me, asking him to give back his Reek and his wife, and the wildling princess, spilling some more haughty aurochs shit about his fake victories on the parchment. He must have been listening to all the wrong songs."

"Roose, his father, came to see Ramsay. They quarrelled under my cage. Roose called Ramsay a fool for writing. He told him to let Reek and false Arya Stark go, and enjoy his lordship. But Ramsay wouldn't listen and he still gave the letter to the raven."

"On a sixth day it was my turn to feel his knife. You've seen how Ser Daven was for a little piece of skin I took, merely to show you what flaying does to men. It makes everyone beg Ramsay to cut off the limb he touches, even the truly brave. Ser Daven did not move an eye when he believed that I, the wildling, was going to slit his throat, but flaying, my good people, flaying is a different thing..."

"Ramsay flayed me for weeks and I lost the count of time. Every day, he would take a bit of the skin on my legs, waiting for me to beg him to cut my leg off. Every night, my cloak was enlarged some more. When he would take both my legs, then he'd let me die, or that's what he told me. Or if I was amusing enough he was going to make me his Reek. I didn't believe him a single word. I expected him to cut off my legs or to make me his Reek, or anything else he wanted in his insane mind, no matter what I did or said. I had no illusion, all it would take was enough time. But I never begged him to cut any limb of mine, and that, alone, has kept me alive, for awhile. That, and the cloak made of skin, an offence crying to the old gods for vengeance, burning bright as the red of their watchful eyes always open on the great weirwoods of the north..."

"Some time into my ordeal, Roose came to see me and commented how he believed that the wildling women were made of sterner stuff, offending the memory of the six who had died at the hands of his bastard. He offered me a glass of red wine, and said that at least the King of the Wildlings was giving his bastard some long deserved amusement, which was going to keep him from seeking it where it could ruin him, offending the high lords, or killing his own father. Roose asked politely if I enjoyed the hospitality of Winterfell."

"I told him that his bastard should have killed me when he captured me for I would be much more amusing dead than alive. He just laughed to that and flayed a piece of my leg himself, and he seemed pleased when I began to scream. Or that's what I thought because his cold face never betrayed any feelings at all."

"But, my lords, the colour of every snow is different," Mance announced with mirth in his crying eyes. "Rumours of an army or armies approaching the castle came in gently, with the second autumn snow storm, on the lips of those serving the unwilling guests of the new masters of Winterfell. No one could leave since the wedding because the snow covered the passages and closed the ways. And Ramsay was reluctant to let the lords go, fearing treason from all sides."

"A boy, a mute, would then come and sit under my cage in the gloom of the night when the bastard would leave me drooling and weeping, unmanned and praying for my death. I would draw patterns in the air in desperation, and I dreamt of chewing my own legs off to stop the pain."

"I drew a map of Winterfell, the position and the number of the guards, the weak points and the exits, all I learned when the spearwives and I enjoyed the freedom of the castle. And the boy in his turn walked the battlements at daytime, climbed the turrets as a lackwit in service of some lord, repeating my _amusing_ patterns in the air. He imitated them in as many high places he could reach without breaking his neck. And the eyes of the army, or armies, had seen it from the outside, hindered by the snow, hidden by the ever changing snow."

"When after quite some time I still had my legs, Ramsay promised me to flay my cock next. _To make me look more like his Reek_ , he claimed, and caressed my head."

"Some time before that, I discovered that my cage was attached to a chain by a thick knot of rope. I didn't see it immediately in grief for losing the spearwives, in blindness from the desire for vengeance, or, more frequently, death. So that night when the boy came, I pointed and stared at the knot, and before dawn my new ally returned with the greatest gift, a frightened man from White Harbor, a sailor, a master of knots. He gestured from below and showed me how to untie it."

"The table of Lord Ramsay lacked in refinement for the flayed, and my bare arms were thin enough to reach the beginning of the knot through the bars of the cage. So when his lordship came to see me in the morning, I was ready to untie it and land on him, cage and all, in hope we'd both die. But he only stood far away, as if he knew what I was intending, wearing a shining armour. He told me he would continue our friendship when he killed all the traitors to him, and after them, his father."

"I wondered whom he could possibly call traitors, the mockery of the man who never had a people."

"I, I had a people," Mance whispered, wanting them to understand, if they could, if the gods didn't make them as they made Ramsay and his father. "I led them against the Wall in hope to protect them behind it. And I saved a life of a Reek, and a life of an innocent girl, leading six good fighters to their death. Those are my crimes."

"Did you learn the name of the girl you saved?" Lady Sansa asked.

"Jeyne..." Mance remembered. "Jeyne Poole. She lived."

Lady Sansa put a hand in front of her mouth to stifle a gasp, and her blue eyes filled with water.

Mance continued, wishing for his story to be over. "That evening, after Ramsay and two other hosts of men rode out in separate directions, the great horns sounded the battle, when the short day gave way to a much longer night. The army of the clansmen from the border of your kingdoms poured into the fortress when one of the treacherous northern lords opened the gates on the inside. They were led by a man called Stannis, a proud kneeler, that one. He calls himself king but few others choose to call him so."

"So when the army breached the fortress, never properly repaired since Ramsay had it burnt-"

"Theon Greyjoy burned Winterfell," interrupted Lady Sansa.

"No, my lady, Reek didn't do it, Ramsay did."

"How can you be certain? And who is Reek?" she inquired, repeating a common unspoken question on her lips, as if she alone dared to speak for the whole of Harrenhal, eager to hear the answer.

"Theon?" she said in disbelief and Mance only nodded.

"So I was still up there in the cage and I loosened the knot a little, letting the cage slide on the chain until it hit the window of one of the towers. I reached for the tower wall with my arms and mutilated legs. I found it was good he flayed me bit by bit for despite the unbearable pain, I still had some use of my legs. I gripped a window sill through the bars of my cage with all my remaining strength."

"Soon the knot got more loose from my movements, the cage hit the wall harder, and its door went ajar on one place."

"I squeezed myself out and I remained hanging on the tower, holding tight. It took me hours to descend the tower, stone by stone. The rough masonry of the First Men was my ladder and I landed safely in the snow. The terrible white cloak I was forced to wear hid me from a company of Ramsay's man that ran past at that very moment."

"I crawled away and I hid in the crypts with the old lords of Winterfell, until the battle was over. I crept into a hole like a coward and I cried. I, who led my people in battle to take the Wall, I who scaled the Wall numerous times and never fell, I ran away from the battle and I wept."

"Stannis won and I came forward to ask for a reward no one promised me, and was lucky that the old fat lord of White Harbor, and some others, upheld my cause and said how the scouting necessary to storm the castle was done by me. Stannis had seen me before but he did not recognise me after the Boltons took me in their care, which was more than good."

"I dared asking three things of Stannis, stubborn and limited, but fair in both reward and punishment, and he let me have them."

"He told me that if I found them, I could have the Boltons, father and son."

"And a horse to leave the cursed place a free man when I was done."

"So first I searched for a mute boy, and then for Ramsay and his father, among the other prisoners. And I searched among the riches gathered by Ramsay from people he killed until I found Frenya's knife. She'd use it to clean fish from the frozen lakes far beyond the Wall," Mance explained showing the knife he used to hurt Ser Daven.

"Roose and Ramsay hid among the smallfolk dressed up as pig herders, but the real herders shunned them. And there were barely any pigs left from the change of seasons and so many armies. I had such close contact with Ramsay when he worked on me that I knew every curve of his body, in every position. I knew him as I know the looks of of the ice on the Wall, when it shines brightly in the sunlight, when it weeps, and when it is safe to scale. So with the help of the mute boy and some clansmen, I captured the Boltons and tied them in the crypts of Winterfell, to the statues of Lord Rickard and his son Brandon, one to each, facing the Lady Lyanna."

"Roose remained calm and told me sweetly that _Littlefinger_ , who had given them a false Arya Stark to lay their claim to the north, together with some Lord Tywin Lannister shitting gold, would give me more coin for their release than a poor wildling like me had ever seen in his life."

"Now I don't give shit about your southron lineages so it took me some time to understand that Littlefinger and Lord Baelish are one and the same. And this is why I don't deem him fit to judge me. I'd rather be a murderer and an impostor, than a sweet talking high lord who sends an innocent maiden to wed Ramsay Snow, knowing she'd be forced to lay with his dogs."

"That day in the crypts Ramsay looked confident that I would take his father on his offer. Roose told Ramsay they were lucky to deal with me, a broken man, where Stannis would surely burn them alive for the new god he started to adore."

"I told them I had a cloak to finish, and their faces changed."

"I told them I could gut a dead bear with my bare hands since I was a young lad behind the Wall. I told them I _was_ the King-beyond-the-Wall, and them mere bannermen who betrayed their lord."

"It takes a lot of human skin to sew a good cloak, my lords," Mance observed in a sinister voice.

"I laid the cloak they were so kind to begin for me over the shoulders of the Lady Lyanna, asking her for forgiveness for soiling her resting place with what I was about to do. The Boltons usurped Winterfell, and I thought that somehow, had she been alive, she'd understand."

"Roose watched me with cold fish eyes and mentioned that he was not going to squeal like a dirty pig as I did in the cage. I took Frenya's knife, and told him that I didn't want his squeals. Only his skin in payment of what they had done."

"May your gods never let you see what I have seen, good people of Harrenhal!" Mance's voice rang empty over the burned and crumpled towers of Harren the Black. "For squeal they did and prayed to gods for mercy..."

"And I," Mance wept like a woman just widowed, with no shame in her weakness, only immense pain, "I hated myself for what I did, I hated myself with every piece of peeled skin, I hated myself for becoming a monster."

"I hated myself some more and I did it anyway."

"After several days, I scattered a bag of Bolton flesh and bones in the woods, a fodder for the beasts. I released Ramsay's dogs and they went to the woods, and ran with the wolves. On a cold morning a large pack passed howling under the walls of Winterfell. They killed a bear and left the carcass in the ditch. The cooks took the meat, and I took the fur to finish my cloak. I found a tanner who helped me with my work, not knowing what kind of leather we worked with. Finally I sewed the bear's fur upon the hem and the hood of my old cloak, black with red, on top."

"So this is the cloak of cloaks, it tells of who I am, of what I can do, of who I love, and of who I hate," Mance faced them all, his weakness banished for a time. "I'm a wildling, a bard, a crow, an oathbreaker, a deserter, a lover and a father, a king to some, and an enemy to others, a mutilated captive, a man, free."

"Why going south?" asked the Elder Brother from behind. Ser Daven's nose looked well tended, and he observed Mance with huge blue-green eyes, in awe or in disgust, no one could tell.

"Because Lord Jon Snow did the unthinkable and protected my people. He would have ridden in person to free me from the Boltons, if he had not been... prevented," Mance said, carefully choosing the words. His errand was still his own and much depended on such secrecy as could be found. "When we met, Jon told me he wanted to be one of us, of the free folk. He betrayed me and defeated me in fulfillment of his oaths. And then, not only he did not kill me, he helped my people where no one else would. Leaving me in his debt forever."

"So when I was done with vengeance, I donned my new cloak for the first time and I made a vow in the godswood."

"I swore that I would go south, and find help for my people, bring help to Lord Snow, against the Long Night."

"And after I did that, I swore that I would return to the godswood of Winterfell and lay my cloak to rest under the heart tree, in honour of the memory of the six spearwives who died so that others may live."

"A convincing story," said Ser Bonifer, unimpressed, "but nothing more. It's just another tale you invented to fool the people. You must be working for Stannis and you want people to believe he defeated the Boltons who were allies of Lord Tywin."

Mance walked the dais, his cloak terrible to behold, his flayed legs showing the goose bumps from cold.

"Some songs are too incredible to believe in," he said in earnest, "but that doesn't make them any less true."

"Ser Bonifer," the Elder Brother said, "I am afraid that we are now forced to take our leave from the hospitality of your lord, who seems to have already taken leave of our company."

All eyes looked for Baelish, but he was nowhere to be found.

"I will make a special recommendation to the High Septon about your faithful service," the Elder Brother continued in a melodious voice. "But now I have to depart or I am afraid that I will be entirely too late for the Queen Cersei's trial. Mance Rayder will accompany me-"

"But Elder Brother, surely, this criminal-" Ser Bonifer tried to say.

"It is the will of the Seven," the Elder Brother claimed with fervour. "Six companions he had lost, protecting the weak, and six he will have again on his way to the capital."

Mance found he could not speak any more. All his words were gone, and only astonishment remained, growing larger when Lady Sansa and Gendry joined him on the dais, followed by Blackwood, and a few of his bloody ravens, who never stopped haunting them since Raventree. One, a few, or a dozen, always on their heels. Black wings fluttered after Lord Tytos, and over the shaven head of the Elder Brother. Mance unwillingly imagined a raven shitting gold on the monk's head and smiled. Ser Daven made no move to leave even if no one held him hostage any longer.

"I don't know how to be a spearwife," Lady Sansa said. "But I will try."

Brother Gravedigger accompanied the bastard of Robert Baratheon and the trueborn daughter of Eddard Stark to the castle door leading to the dungeons. Mance observed how he wrapped his brown monk's cloak around Sansa's shoulders although she was dressed warm enough. Jon's sister gave him something looking like a saddlebag in return, but Mance could not see what it was because his attention jumped back to Ser Bonifer who commanded his garrison to attack. Only half of the men formed lines, and the rest made sullen faces, or the sign of the Seven, to protect them from evil.

The Lannister soldiers formed fully, waiting for Ser Daven's command, and the odds were not good.

Mance stood behind the pile of bows and arrows, threatening and kingly, holding Ser Daven's sword. The soldiers of the Faith advanced towards the dais, encircling it from three sides. The King-beyond-the-Wall glanced over his shoulder and saw no one. _They are all gone_ , he realised, _disappeared in the castle, after the talk of companionship._

When he faced the soldiers again, there was new horror on their faces. He looked for its cause and saw the Brother Gravedigger return to stand by his side, just like when they faced the wights together for the first time after leaving the Quiet Isle. The Lannister soldiers halted as if they had seen a certain death.

"The Hound!" one said in fear.

Mance looked at his Rhaegar, towering over him, wearing a helmet shaped as a snarling dog, a greatsword steady in his giant arms.

"It's not the Hound, you idiots", said Ser Bonifer. "The Hound's dead, there have been many ravens on that. This is only a tall monk wearing his helm and some armour they have stolen from us for the stupid mummery."

The monk unclasped the dog's helm and removed it, shaking his long black lank hair all the way back, revealing the facial burns Mance had seen only once, and which made all the soldiers step back in terror.

"It burdens me to disappoint you, Ser Bonifer," rasped Sandor Clegane, "but I yet live. I should be happy to draw my sigil in your skin if you require more proof of who I am."

And then he addressed the Lannister soldiers: "You all know me. I commanded you in the past. You wish to die, come forward. You wish to live, believe that Jaime knew who I was and let me be. Littlefinger tricked Jaime to leave so that he could plot whatever he wanted. He meant for Daven to be killed by chance so that he can command you all. Will you follow Baelish or your own lord?"

"Your reputation is almost as fearsome as mine among the kneelers, brother," Mance quipped, and the Hound presented himself to the King-beyond-the-Wall: "The name is Sandor Clegane, a well known monster of the south. I have a face of a Stranger to match my reputation, and no lute like you to make my voice sound any sweeter."

"The are only two of them, rabid dogs or not!" yelled Ser Bonifer. "Bring them down!"

The soldiers hesitated when Ser Daven's weak voice fluttered in the air from inside the castle. "Ser Jaime said we could kill the singer if he were a threat to us, but he ordered us not to harm the Lady Sansa, the Elder Brother or the Brother Gravedigger. I command you to stop Ser Bonifer and his men."

The clash of swords followed suit and the soldiers seemed happy to have a reason to attack each other, rather than to deal with the wildling dressed in human skin, or the Hound.

"Time to go," the Hound said pulling Mance away. "Before they change their minds again."

Jointly, they stepped backward to the small door, where the others had disappeared. Before anyone thought to follow them they were out of the dungeons and in the fields of Harrenhal, finding their horses ready and saddled behind the first low hill. That was where the Elder Brother and Sansa led the animals when his execution was about to start, Mance was told. They had also released all the other horses from the castle so it was going to take plenty of time before any pursuit would be formed. The Elder Brother chattered how the beasts obeyed the lady, especially the huge black horse of the Brother G... no, of the Hound, Mance repeated the new knowledge in his head.

They had closed the passage out of the dungeons after them with a boulder so big that all seven of them had to push it in place, even the lady with her delicate arms. That feat sealed it. They were a mummer's troupe. They became a company, in truth, not only in numbers, sacred or not, but in deed.

Mance rode at the rear, with Ser Daven in the saddle behind him that night. Lannister was too weak to steer a horse. The Elder Brother, Blackwood, Gendry, Ser Daven's mount and the ravens were in front of them. Lady Sansa rode ahead with the Hound, her own horse unused, tied to his big black beast like an unnecessary appendage. She still wore his cloak and their shapes melted together in the dark, two black figures on a black horse, diminishing fast in the distance.

The King-beyond-the-Wall breathed freedom and pushed his horse forward.


	19. A Thirsty Steed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Jaime and Brienne are in for some surprises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading

**Brienne**

There was no army in Harrenhal when they arrived.

The peasants shied from Jaime in his white scaled armour, as if he were a fabulous beast and not a knight, so Brienne took up on herself to dress up as a village wench and get some answers. She borrowed the heavy long thick skirts in several layers in the irregularly shaped town of the poor on the outskirts of Harrenhal. They bothered her when she walked, much worse than the lady's finery she had sometimes been forced to wear in her father's castle ever did. She would have never expected that there was something worse than to dress up like a lady, and that was fair and square to dress up as a common woman. The other women in her position did not seem to agree with her, running cheerfully after their work in the kitchens, or bringing heavy jugs of water from the lake, deft and gracious as she would never be. And they were all much shorter than her, causing the awful flood of folds to trail after them on the muddy ground.

Or the ground that would have been muddy if it didn't freeze and harden over night from the change of seasons; they could see no continuous trail showing where the soldiers had gone. A few horse tracks they could find led into all directions and to none in particular. The castle gaped empty of the men-at-arms, only the servants worked hard as if their lord would return at any minute.

"They just left," the baker told Brienne. "To King's Landing."

But the washerwoman told her they rode to the Fingers and a snotty boy heard that one of the companies made straight for Casterly Rock.

None of it made any sense. The questions about Mance the singer, the Elder Brother, or Lady Sansa were all met with a wall of stubborn silence as if no question had been asked at all. If Brienne didn't know any better, she would think that the commoners protected them, from great danger, or certain death.

So she annoyed the baker who seemed to know something, and the washerwoman who sighed about the beautiful lady kissing her prince in the godswood, until they both told her, just to get rid of her, she presumed, to go to the stables and there, she would find her singer.

Brienne went, not nursing much hope in her heart.

And stopped sharply when she heard a familiar gurgle, in place of a trilling lute.

She made a great circle around the stables, in slow counted steps, until she could approach them from behind, grasping a hiltless dagger hidden in her bodice, for it would not do, in her present attire, to wear a sword. They made an exchange: Jaime took her pendant for safe keeping, and he bid her take the knife, and stay safe.

The walls of the stables were thin, not made of the black stones of Harrenhal, but of freshly cut wood, still smelling of pine. _Brought here from the Vale of Arryn_ , she thought, squatting, sneaking as close as she could to better hear the gurgle again, fighting against the persistent murmur of her skirts.

"My lady," she recognised the voice of the red priest, "it's only Tom, you and me now, we cannot hope to prevail against an army."

"And the people won't tell a thing," lamented Tom Sevenstrings.

Lady Stoneheart's inanimate voice squeaked, like a wooden board cracking in two when a too heavy man would venture upon it.

"He told you fifty times what he heard!" complained Thoros of Myr.

"Alright, my lady, I'll tell you again," Tom said. "The man who saved the Kingslayer and his whore was Mance Rayder, King-beyond-the-Wall. He wrote the show they played for you in the pit. He took Winterfell from the Boltons, for Stannis, and it was the Boltons, not the Greyjoy boy, who betrayed Robb. And this Mance works for the bastard of your late husband, who's still Lord Commander on the Wall, or so he told everyone, despite that Anguy shot many ravens sent to capital, when he was still alive, with tidings that Jon Snow's own Sworn Brothers of the Night's Watch had murdered him in cold blood..."

The gurgle was so loud that Brienne thought it would pierce not only the stables, but the Wall, had they been that far north.

"I'm sorry, my lady, it's not as if I could have asked any questions," Tom sounded regretful. "It was a talk he invented to stay his own execution. It had a flare of truth to it, though. My fingers itched to take a woodharp and make verses about it as he spoke. When he finished, they all left, your daughter, the righteous monk, the Hound...the real one, the curly haired Lannister, one riverlord, the one with ravens, and Gendry. No one here will talk and there're no traces."

"You didn't repeat the most important thing. Lord Baelish has lost his arm so he couldn't carry out the sentence. He lied to our ladyship in the pit and he may have been working with the Boltons all along. We may have been wrong about the Kingslayer all the while," the red priest reasoned, in spite of the angry slur coming from the dead woman's throat, denying even a half hearted attempt to redeem Ser Jaime.

"Of course, my lady, I agree," Thoros relented. "We cannot be certain about anything any more. We have to find out more about what this Mance Rayder knows. From his songs so far he knows a great deal more about Robert's rebellion and Lord Stark's youth than anyone left alive."

"My lady, why don't you seek out Lord Howland Reed in person?" Tom asked. "He must know as well."

The gurgle became softer and resembled crying.

"Take courage, my lady," Thoros of Myr said. "We will find new allies and get to the bottom of this."

"South," judged Tom, "we should head south as well. That's where Mance was going. Might be we can see another part of his show."

Brienne had heard enough and she backed away, carefully, eager to find Jaime and share the news with him that all those who helped save them from Lady Stoneheart escaped together with Ser Daven.

 _Lord Baelish's plans, whatever they were, seem to have come to no fruition,_ she thought.

When she paused to hide the dagger back in her bodice, an image of Jaime with a slender woman at the lake crossed her mind, just like she had seen him in the caves facing the white walker before she ever returned for him and realised that her vision had been real.

She would have feared her new ability if she wasn't somehow hurt that Jaime smiled to the unknown woman who was most likely beautiful, elegant, and _small_. And it didn't take all that much to have more grace than Brienne.

 _It would be all right if he spoke to Cersei,_ Brienne told herself. She somehow made her peace with that, for, wrong or right in the eyes of the gods, no one would ever replace Cersei in Jaime's heart.

But to see him flirt with an entirely different woman hurt like treason on his part, as if he were overstepping a promise he had never made.

Scolding herself for stupid, Brienne released the dagger and walked towards the lake.

**Jaime**

Jaime stood next to the lake of Harrenhal, waiting for Brienne to return. The surface of the water glimmered like Lannister gold, reflecting the autumn colours of the grass.

After several days with only Brienne for company, Jaime was back in the world where everyone shunned him for different reasons. It was a familiar thing, but being used to it never made it sting any less.

A hooded thin woman came to fetch some water, bending over the calm mirror of the lake very close to Jaime. She was quite short and walked way too smoothly for a peasant. When she grabbed the water, the dark travelling cloak revealed brown breeches and high sandals with many laces where there should have been a dress.

"Are you lost?" he asked, insolent, wondering if the peasant women now also robbed the dead to be able to dress up in anything at all. That woman certainly looked too fragile to attack anyone and too tender to loot a corpse.

"I hope not," the woman replied, facing away from him. Jaime noticed that the large vessel she was filling with water was of an unusual elongated design with the words of an unknown language engraved upon the baked clay. Suddenly he was certain he had never seen anything like that in Westeros, and he had travelled his share of it accompanying Robert and Cersei.

"That's heavy," he commented lightly, eager to examine the object. "I could help you carry it back if you want."

"My steed is very thirsty," she said. "And your help is not required."

"Who are you?" he asked, less certain about his demeanour.

"A widow," she said. "A mother, maybe. Does it matter?"

"You haven't seen an army passing, have you?" _Asking couldn't hurt_ , thought Jaime. _Maybe she's another ghost of the High Heart prowling the Riverlands and reading the future._

"I may have," she said, "but I don't think it is the army that you seek. Your words remind me of my brother."

"It pleases me that my person brings you good memories," Jaime reacted. "Where is he?"

"He died. Wearing a golden crown. Maybe it will be your death as well," the woman said with a melodious accent and Jaime felt chilled to the bone.

"What would you know of wearing a crown?" he asked back, sarcastically.

"Not as much as I should. Do you presume to know more?"

"No," he said in earnest, wondering why he felt the urge to talk to a perfect foreigner, or maybe that was in itself the reason he continued speaking. "The closest I came to it was to sit on the Iron Throne wearing no crown, only a bloody sword across my knees. Then I stood up and left the throne to a better man."

"And who was the better man?" she wanted to know.

"At that time, anyone but me."

"Who are you?" she mirrored his initial question.

"I don't see why I should tell you. But you could say that I am a man desperately looking forward."

"Why?" she whispered, stirring the peace of the water with the souple sole of her sandal.

"Because if I look back, I am lost," Jaime replied, staring at her shoe drawing a circle on the lake, also of a peculiar design, made for riding, tiny, to fit a noble woman. _Or a queen,_ he thought, realising that the foreigner for some reason held herself as one.

He could tell that his words startled her because she prepared to leave, showing a thread of long silvery hair from under her hood, but never her face.

"Farewell," she said. "If you go to the capital, I may yet see you there."

She walked away from the lake and from the castle, towards the first row of the trees. _Maybe there is another town over there_ , Jaime thought. He decided to follow her from a distance, curious to see her eyes. But she went very fast, and as soon as he caught up with where she should have been, the traces of feet in soft leather disappeared as if they had been lifted in the air.

**Brienne**

Brienne saw Jaime following the unknown woman; a new knife in her heart, sharper than Valyrian steel.

She learned the truth about herself long ago and she knew very well that all Jaime's talk of bedding her was empty at best, and an ugly taunt at the worst.

Yet it was easier to stand that too when the only other woman she knew about was Cersei, a destiny Jaime could not escape, even if Brienne was smart enough to know that it was only a fate he chose for himself. But now he had followed a completely unknown woman, not, a real _wench,_ Brienne thought, to the trees. _Maybe he told her the same things he'd been telling me, and maybe they are together now, laughing..._

The thought of servants coupling in her father's castle came unbidden to her mind, and she just had to know.

She paused to pick up her sword and shield, noting with disgust that Jaime had just _left_ all their possessions at the lake. Brienne chose the same trick that worked for the stables. Walking in a broad loop, she intended to surprise them from behind.

The trees were dark and tall where she entered the wood, and Brienne was dwarfed in their shadow.

A rustle of leaves could be heard from the direction where Jaime must have gone with the woman, to do only the Seven knew what. Embarrassed and humiliated for _having to know,_ she followed the sound to a small clearing.

But the woman was not there, and neither was Jaime.

A huge black beast, covered in scales, spread its wings lazily and breathed a wisp of black smoke at Brienne, whose legs almost gave way. She tried to stay calm, hoping against hope that the monster might leave her be if she didn't provoke it.

The beast made a step forward, each claw on his two bird-like feet larger than her sword. The next blow of smoke was coloured with fire and it came inches from Brienne. She didn't want to wait for the third one.

She raised her painted shield in front of her and stood calm, a Warrior Maiden in a peasant dress, looking for an opportunity to attack. If she could help it, she would not end as a course on a monster's platter. It would not be worthy of her inheritance.

The animal looked at the sigil she had had painted on her shield and snorted in... _Recognition? Could it be?_ Brienne didn't know. Whatever it was, she was grateful.

The beast bent its head in submission, approaching her cautiously, and Brienne was not afraid any more. The monster looked as if it were going to open its mouth and speak to her at any moment.

 _A dragon_ , she realized, _a living dragon_.

A precise jet of fire came from a black dragon's mouth, colouring the falling star painted on her shield until it flickered red with life. She held her shield tight, but it was an unnecessary precaution.

The black lizard crawled back where it came from, ignoring Brienne completely, as if she were only the grass growing, not even worthy of being food. Then it spared her another short look, spread its spidery wings and took flight.

That, for some reason, humiliated the Lady of Tarth all the more, that she was not even worthy to be the prey of the magnificent beast.

She stomped away from the clearing as fast as the skirts allowed her.

And when she finally found Jaime, she was furious.

He was alone, making camp for the night, in a farmer's hut built in the hollow of the hill nearby the lake. The horses look tended and calm, but not even that proof of his efforts could calm her nerves.

The place was modest, but it smelled clean and no corpses could be found; a rare blessing in the times they were trying to survive. It looked like its owner had very recently left it for whatever reason, in search for a better life.

Jaime was out of his armour, and she realized he must have learned how to undress fast with his left hand. It showed how he changed, accepted his condition, from those first moments when the Bloody Mummers maimed him. Back then, she had to beg him to go on, to live, to fight for vengeance if not for anything else.

She rattled how she met Lady Stoneheart and overheard her conversation with the red priest and her singer.

"So it's all the better that we're not using the castle hospitality. I have no longing to meet the good Lady Catelyn so soon, and without some soldiers to cover my back," Jaime reacted.

"There was also a black dragon in the forest-" she tried explaining the rest.

"Yes, and I am a High Septon and you the most beautiful maiden in Seven Kingdoms. How can I resist you?" He provoked her again and Brienne couldn't take it any longer.

It has been quite enough.

"Stop it!" she screamed at him and he winced away. "I know that I may not look like a woman, but I am one! A maiden even, as you put it when you want to wound me to the core!"

She tugged at the laces of her unrefined bodice in frantic movements, almost tearing it apart, until the upper part of her body was naked, her sharp straw-like hair a mess, and she stood in front of him only in her skirts, breathing hard.

"As if you would ever do anything!" she yelled bitterly. "I can stand stark naked before you and you would still not touch me because I am ugly and we both know it! So just stop it, please! I'm not your sister!"

"Gods be good," Jaime said, "you are not."

He closed in on her like an eagle, or a mountain hawk, straight on her breasts. One fit in his hand and another in his mouth. When he kissed her all the way up to her face, an uncalled thought came to Briennes's mind,  _Don't wake the lion from his sleep._ But Jaime didn't look golden at all. His eyes went dark, as if on fire. A stream of black molten steel on which the bright green dots flickered, and danced and almost disappeared, as a call for help of a child, drowning in shallow water.

"Don't ever do that again," he told her, parting from her with great difficulty, "unless you truly want me to do something you will regret."

Brienne fought with the fabric to dress up faster, but the bodice in disarray defeated her, where few man could.

"I'm sorry," she squeezed out, ashamed. "I didn't know. I won't do it again."

She had proven her point. Except that it was not the one she thought to prove.

A new light headedness took over, making her cast the bodice away. She dropped her crumpled skirts very slowly on the cabin floor, peeling them off attentively as she would a fruit. The last layer would have been pale yellow in colour it if had not been stained by usage. It was not ugly, and it agreed with the rosy smoothness of her too long legs.

She straightened the entire dress on the floor as her maids would do with her dresses in Tarth, preparing them for storage, as slow as she could, her embarrassment gone and forgotten. She pulled a thin light blue shift she wore under everything up to cover her breasts, one by one, and then over her shoulders, in measured calm movements. _Trust Pod to be a good squire even with a noose around his neck and bring me my things,_ she thought.

Her monk tunic and breeches were also on the floor, right behind Jaime. Straightening her spine, standing taller than him, she fetched them, taking all the time in the Seven Kingdoms to dress up properly. She stretched her muscles while she was working, revealing perfectly slim limbs and shoulders as much as she could, letting him have a good look if he wanted. She never knew she had it in her; to do to him on purpose what he unwillingly did to her since they met, by being outspoken and by his golden looks.

She could swear he could never take his eyes off her. Although he did his best to pretend he was looking through her, or at his own toes.

"And now," she said, "will you believe me when I tell you that I have seen a dragon?"

**Sansa**

"We forgot the dog," Sansa complained as soon as they stopped after leaving Harrenhal.

"Another one?" the Hound asked. "You have one already."

Sansa blushed furiously, understanding he meant himself, remembering the godswood of Harrenhal.

"The old blind one-" she tried to say.

"Old, yes, but I'm still not blind," he interrupted, impatient, gazing at her figure with stormy eyes.

Sansa ran to the trees, muttering excuses about having to make water. After Mance's horrible story, she didn't even question when Sandor Clegane took her to his own horse to ride away. She went as she would have gone with Robb, as if they shared the same blood.

But now the magic was gone, the day was over, she was still Sansa, and he was not her family.

The unease she felt next to him was growing, a source of expectation and galloping doubt. Sansa decided to be brave as she squatted to make water, and when she did, the small lights of the fireflies went on in the woods. She instinctively knew Nymeria might come that night. She would have to make sure to sleep near the Hound in case Arya's wolf still considered him as food.

When she returned to the camp, she avoided the Hound, approaching Mance and the Elder Brother, equally careful to avoid the wildling's cloak so that she wouldn't have to think about what it was made of. Lord Blackwood snored loudly, a few ravens perched on the tree above him.

Sansa pretended she was checking Ser Daven's nose when the Elder Brother started a conversation with dreamy dark eyes, looking far younger than the number of his name days, "That Jon Snow, he must be quite a man."

"A man and a warg," said Mance, with pride. "He has a white wolf with red eyes and runs with him at night. He may not know what he is, yet. But he will, in time.

"Warg? That's an unproven belief of the north," commented the Elder Brother as an elderly lady prone to gossip.

"As unproven as the white walkers who almost killed you some days ago."

The bald monk was certainly older than her father, Sansa thought, but maybe not as much as she initially assumed. He had a few name days on Mance and that was all, and Mance a few namedays on Lord Eddard. And the Hound was much younger than both if she looked only at the good part of his face.

"What is a warg?" she asked. "Is it the same as the skinchangers Old Nan told us stories about?"

"Before I begin, Sansa, you must know that I am neither, so I am not entirely acquainted with that lore. People like that protect their secrets. A warg normally has one animal and he can leave his body and occupy the body of the animal when he wants. A wolf, a bear and an eagle being the most common creatures to warg into in the north. A skinchanger, they say, can do more. He can enter any living being, even another human and dominate it, not just see through the animal's eyes, not just run or fly. He can force another being to do his will. But to do so to another man is considered a greatest crime among my people. It is not done."

"Can these... skinchangers... talk to animals?" Sansa asked carefully.

"They can make the animals obey them," Mance cut her off. Sansa wondered if she was a warg or a skinchanger because she could feel where Nymeria was, or talk to Stranger, the Hound's hellish horse, until he willingly transported Petyr part of the way in Pennytree.

"And what happens if the animal of a warg... dies?" She had to ask, in honour of Lady's memory. It was Sansa's cowardice and lies, and Queen Cersei's cruelty, that killed her own direwolf.

"Mostly a warg dies too. Especially if they walked together for many years. Or he finds another animal to replace it. But people say that this is very difficult because the new animal has to be very strong, much stronger than the first one, to comfort the wounded soul of a warg after a loss of his life partner, and not crush into pieces under the pressure of his sorrow."

"What if the warg, or a skinchanger, dies?" Sansa went on.

"He rarely does, as long as his animal lives. I knew a man, he fought for me, Varamyr Sixskins, a nasty bastard. He had six animals and six lives. But the white walkers took them all and his the last."

"I think I'd like to meet this Jon Snow, even if he is a warg," the Elder Brother said. "The Seven have taken me away from the Quiet Isle with a reason. I'll go with you when you return north."

"The Seven have no power beyond the Wall."

"Than it is perhaps time to bring their light over there," the monk said with conviction.

"I say we ride further," the Hound said, approaching Sansa from behind. She jerked away because being close too him was too much and she could not take it for the moment. She never meant for her kissing him in make-believe to sow disorder in her soul.

"No," she shook her head and made several steps away from Sandor Clegane.

"Why not? There can be dead things after us! Will you kill them with your sewing needle when they finish the men off first?" he snickered.

"It's safe, I know it," Sansa insisted.

"My lady, Brother Gravedigger may be right," the Elder Brother pleaded.

"His name is Sandor Clegane," she couldn't tell why she defended the Hound despite his awful manners. "All know that now. As I know it is safe to sleep here and to travel these woods as fast or as slow as we want. When we come to the kingsroad again, there will be danger and we will have to find a safe way to reach the capital.

"And how in seven hells would you know that, girl? Did you scout these grounds?" the Hound barked, and Ser Daven wiped some fresh blood dripping from his nose.

"Nymeria told me," she said. "She protects these woods with her pack. She is my sister's wolf. I think that my sister is a warg. And if what you say is true, that they cannot die if their animal lives, than Arya has to be alive."

"The little wolf bitch is surely hard to kill," the Hound said, falling to his knees because Gendry approached him from behind and pulled his giant feet from the ground, catching him off balance.

Sansa's blood boiled too and she grabbed the Hound's shoulders, hissing, "Don't you dare to call my sister, or me, by that name!"

"Oh, I would never presume," he drooled with venom, "that I could be considered _kin_ of my _lady wolf_ and my lady's _wolf sister."_

Sansa understood in shock that the Hound took her words as if she would never consider him an equal. Unwilling mental images of dogs _breeding_ in Winterfell came to mind, and she wondered if he hoped she would think of him as her... what? Suitor? Sansa was happy no one looked at her confused face because it was Gendry's turn to protest: "What have you done to Arya?"

"He did nothing," the Elder Brother said with unmistakable authority. "Young Lady Stark left him wounded to die and rode on to Saltpans. I found him and he drifted between life and death for days. And she must have boarded a ship for she was neither among the dead nor among the living after the sack of that city. I personally tended to the wounded and Sandor Clegane helped me burying the dead, thus earning his new name with which he served the Seven with us, Gravedigger."

"Didn't you ask where she could have gone?" Sansa inquired with hope.

"A ship sailed to Braavos at the time Brother Gravedigger was wounded, and another, to Volantis. I believe that your lady sister left Westeros. And I only went asking because he," he pointed an accusing finger at the Hound, "he is my brother, and he was worried about her. And I have a kinder way of dealing with people than he does."

Sandor Clegane looked grey and tried to snarl at Gendry, but his words lacked conviction, "At least the bastard here has some blood in his veins. It will come handy when he has to kill me in the show."

The day was ripe for more questions, and Sansa dared another one to anyone who would answer. "How was Prince Rhaegar in reality? Has any of you ever seen him? Was he as noble as some people whispered when I stayed in the capital?"

"Yes, a proper lord and a prince! His Bloody Grace!" Sandor Clegane scorned Sansa. "He kidnapped your aunt and raped her! Stop believing the horseshit people gossip about and the lies Mance is putting in your head only because he's gifted with words!"

"Thank you, my friend," jested Mance Rayder, "I didn't take you for a song lover."

"I heard a song or two in my childhood as well," the Hound said, sullen, "everyone in damn Westeros did."

Elder Brother helped Sansa out of trouble. "I lived longer than both of you so I remember well how after the rebellion there was talk among Targaryien loyalists, mainly the smallfolk around the Darry castle that Rhaegar never kidnapped Lyanna, but that she went with him willingly. Rhaegar was married, and neither Lord Rickard or King Aerys would consent that he takes Lyanna for his second wife as the Targaryens sometimes did of old. He had a male heir by that time so there was no need for a second marriage to secure the inheritance of the Iron Throne."

"You wore Aerys's armour on your execution, if you have to know," the Elder Brother added, pointing at the wildling's still armoured chest. "I've seen it on his official portrait when I visited Oldtown. He must have forgotten some of his mail in Harrenhal. The only thing you missed were his rubies. Stolen over time, I reckon…"

"My l…, Mance," Sansa stuttered, swallowing the need to address the wildling with _kneeler_ titles as he would call them. The look on the Hound's face was priceless, at Sansa's _lack_ of proper courtesy when addressing a man.

"Mance, what do you think?" Sansa had to continue. "How do you imagine it had happened? We are almost at the point when we have to read about it if I recall my family history correctly. Did he kidnap her and rape her in your song?"

"No, Sansa," Mance finally told them, more serious than a grave. "Rhaegar didn't kidnap Lyanna."

"Aerys did."


	20. The Bait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Which takes place mostly in the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading.
> 
> Warning for gore, but much less than in some previous installments of this.

**Gendry**

"They told us to wait for them back there," Gendry said to Lady Sansa but she only kept walking.

"I mostly did what I was told," Sansa said, slipping deeper and deeper into the forest, her auburn mane swallowed by the evening shadows, deaf to his pleas just like her sister always had been. "It didn't help."

Beneath them, the kingsroad wound away in a perfectly green twilight of trees, still growing their lavish crowns as if the autumn were not upon them yet. They were only a day ride from the capital, half a day as the raven flies, but the stretch seemed much longer, perilous, and impossible to cross. And they were now moving away from it, deeper into the inhospitable wood.

"I was mostly too stubborn to do what I was told," said Gendry, "and that didn't help either."

"Maybe the gods will have mercy on us both, then," said Sansa and halted in the middle of a clearing, stooping to stare under the tall trees in the ever darkening forest.

"Could be all my fault," Gendry found he had to insist, "you know, if she's Arya's wolf, she may not want to come because Arya hates me and thinks of me as stupid."

"Ser Gendry," Sansa said, "have you ever called her Arya Horseface behind her back with your best friend?"

Gendry's mouth fell open and it was all the answer Sansa needed: "Just like I thought, you didn't. Arya has more reason to hate me than you. But I still refuse to believe that she does. Whether I deserve it or not."

They sat in the wet grass and waited, shivering without the warmth of the fire. With every wisp of wind Gendry thought he could hear a wolf howl, and with every new gust in his face he knew that he did not.

"It was so real, Ser Gendry, a trail of light, Nymeria's words bright and clear in my mind...And yet I led us to ambush twice, in Harrenhal and now here-" Sansa lamented.

"M'lady," Gendry reminded her, "you told from the beginning there would be danger when we reached the road."

"And the calling I had, bidding me to go to Harrenhal served only to find an old lance fit for a dwarf, and the Mad King's armour. All petty things, and Mance could have paid for it with his life! I should take a veil, and become a septa, or a silent sister, withdraw from the world and cry for all my losses... instead of causing more harm." Sansa almost wept and Gendry wondered what he could do, if anything at all.

He thought that a woman who could kiss a man like the Lady Sansa kissed the Hound in Harrenhal, mummery or not, was not going to become a septa, but it was not the right moment to tell her that. Gendry only witnessed the end of the lovers' farewell in the godswood, and all chance encounters he had witnessed of couples together paled in comparison. He dreamed how he would kiss Arya that way one day, when she would grow up.

But Arya was gone across the water, and Gendry was too deep in the cold wood, having to console her sister.

He could offer her a flower, for he noticed that Sansa took great pleasure in small and uselessly gracious things, but there weren't any in the autumn grass. It was getting truly dark, too dark to see, and they should better go back to the camp and make a fire.

So he tried it differently, hoping he could convince her, and make her head back and wait for others. They had to return! They could not be all captured, or... worse...

"M'lady," Gendry said with caution, "why are we still waiting here then? If you don't believe that Nymeria will find you tonight."

Sansa's eyes appeared dark and narrow in the gloom, and she kept staring and listening at the sounds from the wilderness.

"Because, Ser Gendry," she finally said, "I have to believe that all of it, all that I have lived through since I left the Vale, had not been a lie."

Gendry lost the battle, and he knew it.

They remained in waiting, and the darkness took over.

**Jaime**

"You are _not_ taking that dress with you!" Jaime said to Brienne in staggering disbelief.

"It may come handy if I need to find out things again," she simply said, pressing a neatly folded bundle of thick folds in the saddle bag, but her blue eyes danced and told him differently. "I gave the woman some coin for it."

Jaime got warm all over, and remembered to guard his tongue before he would take them both down the path where he would do things to her that she did not deserve.

"You have never ridden to battle, have you?" he said to change the topic and forget the tiny curve of her breast, her scent on boiled leather, rope, and sweet salt. So different from Cersei, yet infinitely better. _Innocent,_ he thought. "I mean riding in earnest, when you go on for days and only make pause for necessities, you barely sleep and you eat in the saddle. Men don't dare to stop lest their lord shortens them for a head as deserters. We have to ride light!"

They stood at the lake of Harrenhal, ready to depart, at the place where Jaime took the white as a boy, during the Great Tourney of Lord Whent, only to soil the honour of it with treason soon after. He found it an excellent place for his honesty to sink further down, to a new level of unprecedented lowness.

After hearing Brienne's story, and believing it, to his misfortune, he decided to make it for King's Landing and save Tommen while he still could, leaving young Lord Arryn to fend for himself. The sighting of a dragon, and the elegant hooded woman he had seen, could only mean one thing in connection; Daenerys Targaryen was back to Westeros with a dragon came to life, and an army not far behind.

Brienne suddenly spoke as if she could read his mind, her rebel blond hair restless in the breeze, "We will ride fast, and we will send help as soon as we can. There are no horses here, and there's only so much we can do. If we meet Ser Daven on the way, you will send soldiers back as you promised."

"One more promise which proved too much for me to keep," Jaime rejected her mercy. He was about to say that at least he never made an oath to bed Brienne, so he'd probably not fail in doing just that one day, but the words choked somewhere half way out of his too big mouth. He remembered her dressing up for him, exposing every curve to his hungry eyes in utmost serenity, so different from the feminine game of hide and seek, and of mindless seduction, he would witness in the capital or in Casterly Rock.

He was getting too close to truly dangerous grounds, so he sounded a retreat while he still could, "Let's just go."

"Just go?" she teased him, and he was unprepared for that. "And here I expected you to call me wench or something, for a good head start."

Jaime laughed and almost blushed at her comment, granting her wishes. On the water of the lake their reflections met, two silvery ghosts on a clear blue.

"Wench," he said, "without you my honour would be like a ragged horse blanket, worn and ruined from too much usage, and only good for the dogs to shit on."

The Lady of Tarth smiled profusely as if his rude remark were the most gallant statement she had heard in a very long time.

"Show me," she said, "how to ride to battle."

Galloping away, Jaime realised that she had twisted her immaculate sense of honour to accommodate his latest transgression of the knightly vow to protect the weak. And instead of hating her for not staying true to herself, he was immensely pleased.

Brienne did it for him, and he could worship her for that alone.

They left Harrenhal, not by the way of the woods; they followed the kingsroad in straight line. They had good horses, and they moved forward with great haste, yet Jaime had to wonder how much faster he could arrive to King's Landing if only he could ride, not a horse, but a living dragon.

They never noticed a party of soldiers struggling against their captives, half way up the hill on the right side of the road. They passed by it the night before they reached the capital, never the wiser for what they had missed.

**Mance**

The sellsword from the Golden Company exchanged angry words with the man who was to witness the King-beyond-the-Wall's execution in Harrenhal named Rafford, but the other men called him Raff the Sweetling.

Mance stretched his ears from where he was tied a few steps behind, to better hear the argument. He'd not known what the Golden Company was, but the Hound enlightened him earlier that day when they were laying in the bushes, spying at the enemy camp. Until the Elder Brother walked right into it, hand in hand with Lord Blackwood, in front of their four unbelieving eyes.

The monk left them a message with Ser Daven that the only way for the rest of their party to pass unharmed to King's Landing was if somebody came down the road and got himself caught, as a bait, of a kind. And he didn't believe that the soldiers would truly hurt him or Lord Tytos.

The Hound was adamant that the man, Raff, who rode with Ser Daven, but who used to be a right hand man of someone called the Mountain, was going to kill them both when he had his way with them, in cold blood.

Mance had to think fast and the best he could come up with was for all of them to end up captured, except Sansa, and Gendry, because he was Robert's bastard, and she needed some protection if the old gods chose not to help them that night.

With Ser Daven and the Hound, they attacked the soldiers haphazardly, putting up a show of good resistance, but with utmost attention to save each other's back. They surrendered and they only suffered scratches. It was getting dark, and the soldiers bound them together under remarkably old trees, a grove of slender redwoods, whose majestic height made Mance long for their cousins, the great dark ironwood forests infesting the North. _His North_ , and not the one of the kneelers.

Mance looked again to where the wagon was.

The Elder Brother and Blackwood were locked up in it, and Raff mentioned that the same destiny awaited the lady who had travelled with them, as soon as good old Raffard could find her too. _The wagon is well worth the agony_ , the wildling concluded, opening his ears further, steeling himself for what had to be done.

"Old Griff is going to have us killed, or our commander will snuff us in person when we return," the sellsword told Raff the Sweetling who didn't look sweet at all. "These men have nothing to do with the disappearance of the Young Griff. You lied to us."

"I didn't!" the addressed man sounded offended. "They may have known, and they surely stole a great lady of the highest birth that our Lord Baelish is offering to your Young Griff for wife. She alone is worth a kingdom!"

"That is no matter of mine!" the soldier disapproved. "I need to find the Young Griff, not some forest lass. Suit yourself, Raff, talk to prisoners, or wait for your lord. We're leaving."

Mance wasn't a warg but his hearing was as sharp as that of a direwolf. He took in every single word of that conversation, and was glad in his heart. _Good,_ he thought. _Leave us, then._

When the thundering of hooves confirmed the welcome departure of the golden folk, he said to his companions: "We will continue with the show now, if it please you."

Mance was tied to a tree together with Ser Daven, who couldn't part from his company since Harrenhal, by force or by accident. The Hound had a redwood all to himself, thinner than the trees in Mance's beloved North, but equally great in its unhindered climb towards the invisible sky, and he shared it only with a lost squirrel and a few roosting ravens.

"You are mad," the Hound told him. "You want us to continue with your _mummery_ right now?"

"Why not, by the old gods?" Mance said, wriggling to feel a crooked fish knife in his small clothes for reassurance. "We are running late, we have to read it all before we play it in King's Landing." _Good,_ he concluded inwardly, in knowledge that he could free himself easily enough.

"The next part is between Aerys and Rhaegar," offered Ser Daven, revealing he had _seen_ the parchment before to Mance's surprise because he had never given it to him.  _I have to be careful or someone will still my song._ "Corbray is not with us," Daven said.

"I was hoping you could take over from Corbray. And Sandor is so angry with me that the words will come to him like sweet talk comes to others," Mance proposed.

"Bugger you, wildling," said Sandor Clegane, but he nevertheless looked at Daven as a well trained dog accustomed to obey.

The curly-haired Lannister cleared his throat and started, his wounded face swollen with pride for being let in on the show.

"Son," Aerys told to Rhaegar from one redwood to another. "I have to share an important matter of the realm with you."

"I am listening, Father-" "Your Grace!" Aerys scolded his son. "Your Grace, Father," Rhaegar repeated stubbornly.

"Lord Rickard and his son Brandon are traitors to the realm. They plan to rebel against us and crown Brandon King of the Seven Kingdoms. His marriage to Catelyn Tully should greatly advance their cause."

"How do you know, father? Has your pyromancer seen it in his fires?" Rhaegar said angrily with no respect for Aerys. "Our ancestors believed in the light of the Seven and in the fire of the dragons. And you ordered an evil substance conceived by the false maesters and treacherous warlocks in faraway lands!"

"Fire can't be evil," said Aerys, equally stubborn as his son. "And the fire they are making for me is my own, not from anywhere else."

"So it is true then? You would give us all to wildfire if there is a war against you?" Rhaegar asked and his voice shook for real. "If you kill the Starks with no proof of their treason then indeed the kingdoms might stand up against you and no one can measure the consequences."

"They will give me the proof themselves," said Aerys.

"More danger in your voice," Mance advised Ser Daven. "Much more malice."

"Think of Lord Tywin," Sandor Clegane tossed in. "Or Jaime at his best."

"They will give me proof," Aerys spat venom at his son. "They will come to me and try to kill you, my only son and heir. For you have just kidnapped and raped the Lady Lyanna, their precious daughter and sister. The entire realm talks of nothing else! And her body will soon enjoy the company of the lizard lions, never to be found."

"What have you done to her, Father?" the prince asked in a voice laced with fear.

Mance stopped listening to his own play, scouting the dark. A cloud of thick green dusk covered the road, and only some ten men from Harrenhal were left to guard them, a mix of scum listed from both Ser Bonifer and Ser Daven, bought by Baelish to wait for the Lady Sansa at the kingsroad.

It was time.

Sandor Clegane could apparently read in his eyes what he was up to because he whispered curtly: "Raff the Sweetling. He's the only half-dangerous one, and he's mine."

It had become dark enough. Mance nodded to Clegane and clenched his teeth.

"What have I done?" Aerys laughed madly. "Nothing! You did. Your reputation of being noble, my son, is soiled forever. I made certain that Elia knows it, too. And you made certain that my plan would work when you crowned Lady Lyanna your Queen of Love and Beauty. I couldn't have thought of a better way to ensure its success."

Mance twisted his arm with a fierce practiced movement, making the wrist bone of his left hand jump out of its place, swallowing a gasp of searing pain.

"You are a monster," Rhaegar accused his father.

The King-beyond-the-Wall bit his lip to better ignore the burning of his bones. The deformed hand was shaped differently enough to let it slip through a tight knot of rope destined to hold it in place, just like he expected.

Swift as a bat chasing after its prey at night, Mance freed himself. He turned the ropes on Ser Daven's hands loose with the help of his fishing knife, then crawled to the Hound and did the same. The mummery went on, the voices of the players clear and shrill in the green silence of the night.

"Louder," Mance commanded them when he returned to his tree. "Spoil their night's rest with the whip of your voices."

"That's what they are whispering behind my back," hissed Aerys, "the Mad King! So be it! But if my head rolls, my son, so will yours. You would do good to recall it instead of embarking on a wild hunt, destined to doom."

"If I want to find the Lady S... Lyanna," Sandor Clegane bellowed hard enough to wake up the dead, "there is nothing you or anyone could do to stop me from it. I swear to you, Father, I will find her!"

"Over my dead body," said Aerys.

"If necessary," Rhaegar threatened his father, when firm steps finally came up towards them.

 _It worked_ , Mance thought, forcing his joint back in place with a muffled scream. Raff and another soldier approached the prisoners, swords in hand.

**Aegon**

It was the blackest wood he had ever seen.

For the first time since he left Jon Connington, when they were well on their way to the capital from the Stormlands, with raised banners of the House Targaryen, Aegon considered that his reaction may have been hasty and unthoughtful. Riding for weeks to find his aunt, sighted flying a dragon over a ruined castle, according to a man sealing his letters with the sign of a mocking bird, seemed like the most ridiculous and possibly the worst thing he had ever done.

Not to mention that he could not find that castle, and that he may have passed it without ever knowing if he'd been close to it.

The trees whispered and the cold was growing thick like a fog might over the river Rhoyne Aegon sailed on in his youth. It had never been that cold in the places across the sea where he grew up, and the sensation made him doubt that he was Rhaeagar's son and heir, born in the lands he was just discovering. They looked outlandish and strange beyond measure, and their icy touch brought forth another feeling almost unknown to him.

Fear.

Black was one of the colours of the House Targaryen, yet he would give anything to see the silver light of the moon, or a new dawn.

He feared that wood.

He rode a little bit further and decided to make camp, fighting an urge to climb up and sleep in the tree, as if there were watchful eyes of a monster waiting to snatch him and devour him whole, if only he lingered too long on the ground.

Curled in his bedroll next to his horse, he could not catch sleep. _Tomorrow I will go back,_ he thought. _But tomorrow it might be too late, a_ nother inner voice said but he refused to listen.

When he didn't think it possible, it turned even darker and colder.

He had given up on sleeping and decided to ride again, but when he untied the horse, it jumped in fear and ran off whinnying in bewilderment.

Aegon looked around.

There was a milk coloured someone, or something, carrying a weapon with a long crystal blade. It was gliding on the wind from the distance, closing fast on Aegon. Before he could see it better, another figure, black cloaked and slender, stepped right in front of him from behind the tree where he'd tried to sleep. Somehow this new appearance frightened him less than what was coming for him from afar.

"Hello" he tried to say and sound brave. "Do you have a name? What is it, do you know? Over there in the back?"

Only soft gurgle came from under the hood. Long bony arms stretched towards him and gripped his neck in an iron grip. They were the coldest thing he had ever felt.

**Mance**

Raff the Sweetling did not like Sandor Clegane.

Mance saw it in a moment, moving his hands slightly to see that he could free them when needed.

"Caught by your betters," Raff said with joy. "Ser would be proud of us."

"Ser is an ornament of Prince Doran Martell's palace in Dorne now," the Hound barked back, undeterred. "Or maybe of his Water Gardens where children can laugh at him. Far be it from me to yearn for such distinct honours."

"You might when I'm done tickling you!" said Raff, laughing. "We're still ten and your hands are tied. A baby pup who lost his belly for fighting!"

All ten men now stood armed next to the prisoners, when Raff walked to the Hound holding a hunting knife. Mance counted the odds, and realised they could prevail, but not without at least someone being seriously hurt. He pondered whether to give a sign to Ser Daven or not, when Raff the Sweetling made a gash on the Hound's black tunic, drawing out some blood from his broad chest.

He smiled sweetly and pointed his blade at the good part of the big man's face, coming very close to the prisoner.

"What do you say that we make it the same like the other half? To have a match..."

But before he could proceed, two strong arms grabbed his head, nearly crushing his skull. The dagger was dropped and Raff squirmed in vain to escape.

"This _pup_ lived in a peaceful place where we received many ravens," the Hound said coldly. "So I heard about the last man _ser_ killed, Prince Oberyn. Gregor squashed his head. As a younger brother, should I not be bound to follow his example, what say you?"

Raff squealed but to no avail.

"No!" a woman's voice said, and a long poignant howl was heard in its wake. "Don't kill him, please. It makes no matter. We will just take Petyr's wagon from them and leave."

"Is that the lady you were looking for, Raff?" the Hound asked, sheer hatred twisting his voice. "You'll never have her, do you hear me? First you will burn in seven hells!"

"No!" Sansa cried again.

A huge direwolf ran past Mance to the man the Hound would not let go. It was a wolverine, and her teeth buried themselves in the soft skin of Raff the Sweetling, as if he were a suckling pig. An inhuman wail pierced the night and everyone could hear the crunching of his bones.

"Nymeria, no!" Sansa screamed, but it was too late.

The remaining soldiers stared in horror at the beast feasting on their leader, unable to fight. They ended tied up to the trees, meekly, one on each, for there were enough for all.

"I told her to wait," Gendry excused himself to no one in particular when the deed was done. "But she wouldn't have it."

Mance was overwhelmed to see them both, and the wolf of the same size like Jon's pet, Ghost, only grey in colour. He carefully moved closer to the direwolf and whispered his fervent thanks to her. For it was only her timely arrival that made sure that they all kept their limbs intact for what still awaited them in the capital.

The direwolf circled Sandor all the while, a pair of veiled grey eyes holding a dark yellow gaze, unrelenting.

"It's all right," Sansa said. "She doesn't hate you any more. She wanted to see if you would try to kill Raff the Sweetling or work with him to bring me to Petyr, or to the queen, whoever pays you best. "

"I would never deliver you to anyone, and least of all for coin," the Hound muttered.

"I know that. But Nymeria did not."

"You don't either, girl. You should assume that I would, for your own sake. I'm as bad as anyone else. Probably worse than most."

"I told Nymeria we were kin. Please, don't be awful about it-"

"How could you possibly convince a bloody wolf of a thing like that?" he snarled.

"She's a direwolf-" "Whatever! It's one and the same. A dog is a dog!" the Hound wouldn't listen.

"A dog was a wolf once," Jon's sister told with finality to one of the fiercest warriors in the Seven Kingdoms, holding his angry gaze as if it was nothing to her. "Before he was tamed and trained to serve a master. And a bird was a direwolf, before they put her in a cage and made her sing. We _are_ kin, you and I."

Mance Rayder witnessed a fleeting uncertainty crossing the scarred face of a killer when the lady walked away, caressing her wolf's grey head.

**Aegon**

Aegon woke up bathed in faint sunlight, feeling almost warm.

Two children, a boy and a girl, looked at him with mild curiosity. The girl was tugging at his silver hair in amazement as if it were a precious toy. Startled, she removed her tiny fingers as soon as he opened his eyes.

"Jeyne, he's awake," the girl called out to someone else.

The hooded figure from the woods came in his line of sight. Her face could not be seen, and she was busy with her bony fingers, disentangling very long strands of raven black hair, hanging out aimless all the way to her waist. _So her name is Jeyne,_ Aegon thought, touching his own neck, not finding any traces of being hurt. _And I must be dreaming._

"Hello," the little girl said, "I'm Willow, and that's my sister, Jeyne."

"He is Robin," she said, pointing at the boy. "People call him Sweetrobin but he hates that. Some others will join us later."

"Why doesn't Jeyne… speak?" Aegon asked.

"My sister has been hurt," Wlllow said. "I speak for her. She says she is sorry for grabbing you for your neck, but she had to let the Other think that she would kill you for real. Only when he thought so, he left."

"Other?" asked Aegon.

"A white walker," peeped Robin. "They wake up when it is cold, or it gets cold when they wake up. Normally they live far north behind the Wall."

"But when the winter comes, they can be anywhere," Willow finished the tale.

Aegon searched in his mind and found only the whispered teachings of Septa Lemore in his childhood, her crib stories about the terrible legends of the north, and of the Long Night on Westeros, eight thousands years ago. Such things could not possibly be true. Besides, his septa was Dornish, and she had never even been to the north. She could not know.

But the creamy figure hovering over the ground smelled real, and so did his fear, still palpable in the weak light of the day.

Aegon did the proper thing he'd been taught to do and bowed deeply in front of Jeyne.

"Thank you, my lady," he said. "I am in your debt."

Jeyne made a clumsy curtsy in return, and murmured a reply, never showing her face.

"Not at all, Your Grace," Willow translated in wonder. "She called you 'Your Grace.'"

"Is that not a proper way to address the King?" asked Robin. "Are you the King?"

"I am Aegon of the House Targaryen, Sixth of my Name…" a very disturbed gurgle interrupted a flood of his titles.

"Jeyne bids you not to speak of that, not here," Willow said. "We have to move south before you can claim your kingdom."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the comments and concrit is very welcome.


	21. Pitch-Black

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the characters arrive to King's Landing but not all of them fare well.

**Jaime**

The white Kingsguard armour brought Jaime straight to the Iron Throne. The guards even let Brienne in, not asking any questions. _Small mercies._

The court was full for the morning audience where the king would hear the plaints of his people. Tommen sat the Iron Throne with Cersei at his side. A huge new brother of the Kingsguard towered before the king and the Queen Regent standing guard, his face hidden by a white helm. Old Mace Tyrell wore the badge of the Hand of the King. _How very good for you, Lord Hand. Only the title of the Lord of Harrenhal bears a higher likelihood of violent death,_ Jaime thought mockingly. The court was full of Tyrell roses and the Warrior Sons, the crimson cloaks of Lannister guards almost nowhere to be seen. If the knights of the Faith did not wear swords, he would think he was in a newly built sept and not in the royal palace.

 _How it has changed,_ Jaime thought. _Every time I leave this city and come back to it again, it's a different place all over._ Tapestries with roses decorated the walls where once stood the hunting scenes and the crowned stag of Robert Baratheon. _Soon the dragon skulls will return from the cellars, I reckon,_ he thought and didn't care.

He only cared about what he came to do.

He looked for Uncle Kevan but he could not find him. Cersei wore a black dress with starched skirts as if she were a pious septa. The black only enhanced her beauty in Jaime's eyes, her sparkling green eyes and hair like molten gold. _At least she didn't turn into a Warrior's daughter, wearing a sword,_ he thought. He would never be able to resist her when he didn't see her for a long time. _Wasn't she supposed to stand a trial?_ he remembered, but there was no time for further thoughts.

"Lord Commander," Mace Tyrell addressed him, "we are glad that you could return for the funeral. Have the Riverlands been brought to King's peace? The news of it have been different of late, depending on who tells the story."

"Depending on who lived to tell the tale, Lord Hand," Jaime said sweetly.

"Uncle!" Tommen interrupted with a good-natured voice of a cat loving boy, not a king. "Uncle Kevan was murdered just a day ago! It's good that you returned to help us find the killer. Maester Pycelle is dead as well."

"Your Grace," Cersei said softly. "Lord Commander is tired from his journey. He has to rest before he informs us of everything."

"Tommen," Jaime said and dead silence followed. The entire court noticed the absence of the proper words in his treatment of the king. Cersei's beautiful face went pale as a corpse and she only missed the bright blue eyes to resemble the living dead Jaime had burned, up north in the Riverlands.

"I am not your uncle," Jaime continued, I am your-"

"Witchcraft!" Cersei screamed like a mummer would on a smallfolk fair, tearing apart her black gown in fake penitence, revealing too opulent breasts of a lady who had nursed more healthy children. They hung forward, and made her twin speechless. All eyes looked at her, and not a single one at Jaime.

"Ser Robert!" the Queen Regent commanded, "Lord Commander of the Kingsguard has been bewitched by the so called ghost of the High Heart, an evil thing contrary to the blessed will of the Seven. I would not have it when the Lord Paramount of the Trident sent us the raven bearing these sad news, but now I see it to be true."

"Tommen," Jaime said, obstinate as when he offered Lady Catelyn to warm her widow's bed in the dungeons of Riverrun, finishing his thought despite the turmoil of the court. "I am not your uncle. I'm your father. And we have to leave King's Landing before Daenerys Targaryen comes back to take what is hers. She has a dragon! No army will stand in front of such enemy. As to Lord Baelish, I had the great pleasure to know him better in the Riverlands and I am quite certain that he had sent ravens to the last Targaryen as well, perhaps with some more valuable information than my presumed insanity.

None of them would hear reason, and Jaime wondered if it had always been like that at court, only that he was ofttimes unable to see it, safe in his love for his siblings who, at least in the past, would do anything for him, and he for them.

"Seize him!" Mace Tyrell ordered the knights of his house. _For the first time he agrees with Cersei in earnest. It must not come lightly for him, to side with a Lannister in truth,_ Jaime thought about the head of the House Tyrell, an old rival of the House Lannister. He advanced towards the Iron Throne among the undecided roses, eager to reach Tommen and at least repeat what he had to say, hoping that the innocent boy would hear him.

"Grievous tidings, my lords, grievous indeed," said the slow voice of Varys the eunuch from the left side under the throne. "They say that not only one, but two Targaryen pretenders are marching on the capital, Daenerys Stormborn from Dragonstone and a boy with silver hair claiming to be Aegon of the House Targaryen, Sixth of His Name, Rhaegar's son who we all know died-"

"-who was murdered by Ser Gregor Clegane at the orders of my father," Jaime added ruthlessly.

"Grievous tidings, as I said, Your Grace," said Varys, ending his own thought with perfect ease, "but entirely untrue. The realm is safe with its rightful King Tommen, First of His Name."

Jaime was lifted from the ground by a pair of strong arms of his new sworn brother, who looked even taller than Ser Gregor the Mountain in the white armour of the Kingsguard. He tried to see the man's face but he could not. He only thought that under the helm he might have seen a strand of auburn hair, and the eyes of crystal blue. Struggling against his captor, he turned to Tommen and Cersei.

Tommen's eyes watered as if what Jaime had told him saddened him beyond measure.

 _What did they tell you about me, boy?_ Jaime thought, bewildered, more regretful than ever for never being a part of his son's life, just like he hadn't been there for Joff before it was too late. He noticed two more people close to Cersei, two who by rights should not even stand in court, much less next to the Queen Regent. There was Qyburn, who saved Jaime's life, but who was no better than the rest of the Bloody Mummers who took Jaime's hand and killed hundreds of innocents in the many times bloodied fields and streams of the Trident. And a beautiful dark haired woman in a Myrish dress who only had eyes for Cersei.

 _Sweet sister, so it was not only Osney and Osmund, and the Moon Boy, and the Others know who else, but also the Myrish beauty,_ Jaime thought with a pang of jealousy threatening to burn him alive, as if he had been a wight, and not a living thing. They must have all entered Cersei's cold bedchambers in the nights of the long summer since Robert Baratheon's death. While Jaime was away.

His sister stood as a statue of a Mother, all grief and proper sorrow. She borrowed the Mother's holy voice to rise to the occasion: "I endured a penitence walk for my sins, a fruit of a widow's weakness. It is only just that my brother suffers the same for his transgressions. Mercifully, not on the way through the city as I had to walk, for he is not himself. I will pray to the Mother that he recovers from the evil that made him lose his mind. Let him walk only from here to the black cells. All present in court, do us this kindness in the name of King Tommen, extend Lord Commander the pleasure of judging his actions. Please, share your true feelings with my dearest brother. It is for the best."

Tommen nodded gravely, trying hard to look older.

Jaime didn't know what Cersei meant, but he feared he would discover it soon enough.

His mysterious sworn brother stripped him of his white armour, and of all else, as if he were a common thief sentenced to die. Than he nudged him forward with a metal clad hand, colder than snow, and it had only been a short while since Jaime learned how cold the snow could feel. They made him walk through the throne room, towards the yard, and in the direction of the black cells. Jaime walked naked as his name day while all present at court showered him with insults. Many spat at him and hit him as he passed. _Is this what they did to Cersei?_ he thought. _The mob? In the city?_ He was moved by deep pity for her and ignored his own pain.

When they reached the second level of the dungeons, his body started feeling numb from blows and unearthly chill. _Winter,_ he thought and laughed hysterically, suffering another blow from one of the Warrior's Sons zealous to enforce penitence on him, wondering if the ghost of Eddard Stark could hear him thinking the Stark words deep in the bowels of the Red Keep. _Winter is coming,_ Jaime thought. _Even here in the south, there is no doubt about that._

Almost at the stairs leading to the third underground level, that of the black cells far beneath the hall of the Iron Throne, a familiar woman's voice pierced the chatter of insincere insults. "Kingslayer!" Brienne shouted.

An offence no one else had given him yet in his walk of shame, for it was not convenient to remind the court of his biggest known crime, the one that brought into power the so-called father of the boy who was now king. _Brienne,_ he thought but he could not speak for her lean body crushed into his, _beating him_ on his face worse than any other courtier did. They fell down a flight of stairs, and he ended all over her. She cried out in pain, struggling to get up, but he wouldn't let her, wanting to pierce her blue gaze with a betrayed green look of his own.

But he could not, because they landed in utter darkness in which, for a second, they were completely alone. The rest of his penitence party would descend safely and slowly, carrying lanterns and torches.

Her insult hurt Jaime profoundly, for she said it as if she had meant it, just like she would in the first days of their travels together when she still served Lady Catelyn wholeheartedly as only Brienne could. He opened his mouth, the last weapon left to him, to wound her, when he was pulled forward by two long hands. His words got sealed with warm swollen lips tasting better than summerwine, better than anything. The numbness and the chill were gone. Wildfire whirled in his belly when he responded to her kiss with an eagerness he didn't know he could muster.

"Kingslayer..." she sighed sweetly in his face and was gone.

He felt all his bruises again, but he could also suddenly feel something else in the sweaty palm of his sole hand. He kept it clutched for no reason at all, until his walk ended and a heavy door closed behind him, leaving him in an even more absolute darkness of an ancient holding cell where he could barely stand up straight. They gave him a tunic harder than a hempen rope. He hurried to dress up, despite being alone, as a maid eager to preserve her modesty.

Only then he opened his hand and by the shape he knew he was holding a black obsidian pendant Brienne had worn before she gave it to him for safe keeping. He had it around his neck in the Throne Room. They must have stripped it away with his armour and his garments.

 _She came after me to give this back to me,_ he thought. _She must have kissed me only to give me this. Why?_

 _No,_ he understood it, finally, _she hit me for the others to see, and than she did the only thing that in her mind could make me believe that she didn't mean to betray me. Not again._

He caressed the small black thing as if it were a lion cub, holding it close to his chest. Suddenly he saw Brienne in his mind as if he were only one step away from her. She was weeping inconsolably in one of the corridors of the Red Keep, searching for a way out from its walls, into the sunlight and semblance of good life. He missed her, terribly so.

Hitting him, or kissing him, it mattered little.

For the first time he considered that telling the truth to Tommen in front of them all had not been the cleverest thing he ever did. His brother Tyrion would have surely thought of something better. _Maybe I should have asked Brienne to help me kidnap my son,_ he chuckled in fear of losing his mind.

Jaime expected some resistance, the truth be told, but he would have never believed that Cersei would make him endure what she did, to keep up with the lies they told for years. He'd known for long that his love for his sister would be his undoing and that he was never going to learn. If there was any evil spell on him, it was her. But even that was another lie. There had never been any spell. He just loved her and that was all. And whatever else she was, or did, Cersei loved him too.

Jaime grasped the sharp black jewel tightly and waited. He was certain that his twin would not be tardy in paying him a visit.

**Elder Brother**

"Yes, mummers," the Elder Brother repeated serenely to one of the men from the City Watch guarding the gate as if he were talking to an oaf, the monk's dark gaze calm like the sea at night. He wore Mance's human cloak and held the reins of the wagon pulled by five horses. "There are also two brothers of the Seven riding in our company. One is here for the trial of the Queen."

"We can escort them to the High Septon," the guard offered. "He seems to be expecting the Elder Brother from the Quiet Isle."

"I will go myself, at once," said Mance Rayder with authority, hiding under the Elder Brother's brown coil, riding Patience. Sandor Clegane luckily didn't say a thing. Even his hellish horse kept quiet, and the monk wondered if Sansa had bewitched them both. The Elder Brother's opinion on Sansa has never been quite the same since Mance had explained them about wargs and skinchangers, but his unease towards her ran deeper than a simple dislike of a natural ability contrary to the teachings of the faith. Sansa started to make him nervous as a man. Except that it was not her, it was a memory she woke up, but he could not say of whom. Maybe he was finally going to remember more vividly at least one of the women he did a tumble with in his old life, not that it would do him any good to awaken such appetites in his station and mature age. Yet he was curious to know.

Sansa and Blackwood peered out of the wagon wearing the white weirwood masks, waving at the guards to give more credit to their story. Sansa's hair was high up in the elaborate southern style. The semi-darkness inside the wagon did not let the red gleam in her hair shine, a colour which, in the sun, would make the sunlight shy and hide away.

The human skin felt warm and strangely safe along the Elder Brother's body, as if it wanted to protect him from a threat unknown. He cursed himself for such feelings, and asked the Seven to forgive him for cursing. _What is wrong with me?_ he thought and he knew he was changing. He stopped being the man who left the Quiet Isle, but the answers he sought would not yet come. Perhaps they never would.

He wore the hood down and the guards stared at his rounded head and dark eyes, at loss as to what they should do. The Elder Brother remained perfectly calm in certainty that not even the High Septon had ever seen his face. There was no way he could be recognised. The only people who have seen it were some of his brothers on the Quiet Isle, and only two of them were still alive, Sandor Clegane, and Robert, the brother apprentice healer who started to call himself Benjen, after Mance's show.

The Elder Brother prayed to the gods that the gold cloaks would not search the wagon and discover a bastard of Robert Baratheon, wounded Ser Daven Lannister, at least three ravens (the quantity of black birds following Blackwood, or all of them, was always far from certain), and a huge living female of a direwolf. Only the gods knew what would happen then.

"May we come in, if it pleases you?" he asked, not showing his impatience in the slightest. "It's getting dark and we should find an inn."

The gods were good and an hour later they were in a dirty winesink eyeing with suspicion the big kettle of the bowl of brown waiting to be served. Lady Sansa frowned and even Clegane who was not picky about food did not seem to approve of the smell. Mance produced some coin and ordered them cheap ale instead. He picked up his lute and left, telling them to wait, and stay out of trouble.

When the ale was gone, the northern singer returned as well, with a bag full of fresh looking food and new coin, his eyes twinkling with joy.

"A singer could make a living over here," he said. "Pity I would miss the cold."

"First time in the capital?" rasped the Hound.

"Yes," Mance said. "On my previous visits south of the Wall I've been to the riverlands, even to the westerlands of yours, but that was as far as I went."

"How do you know he's a Westerman?" asked the Elder Brother.

"Isn't it obvious?" Mance asked and answered. "Their mouth is normally even harsher than their deeds. A fashionable thing over there, I'd say. No offence meant, brother killer. As opposite to us northerners who are scarce with words. If we say to someone that we'll kill him and cut him in two pieces, we'll probably cut him in four."

Sandor Clegane made that awful sound which in his case meant a friendly laugh as the Elder Brother well knew. The monk's gloomy keen eyes of a raven, seeing all, observed the Lady Sansa giving a furtive look to a twitching burnt face, and then to Mance, pondering his words.

 _All is well,_ the Elder Brother thought, strangely at ease with all his companions, despite the cloak they made him wear, and despite that they convinced him to commit the sin of showing his face. _I did it to save them from possible harm. The Seven will see and they will understand. And_ t _omorrow I will seek out the High Septon, find out why he bid me come, and soon I can go back to my solitude and the many labours needed for the weak._

But for some reason the thought of his imminent return to the Quiet Isle did not make him anywhere as pleased as it should have. He thought of the Wall, and of the marshes of the Neck, where Lord Reed had his moving seat, one of the best hidden wonders of the Seven Kingdoms. And he saw himself traveling far, a pilgrim of the Seven, restless to bring their light to the farthest corners of the realm. There were no monks left on the Quiet Isle anyway.

**Jaime**

"Well met, beloved sister," Jaime told her when he heard the black cotton rustling hard in the darkness.

She didn't wear a lantern and her perfume came closer to him than what he would have liked, making him cough. _If I choked, she would step over my body daintily and make a small surprised smile,_ Jaime imagined, laughing at the senselessness of his own thoughts.

"Did you also come to see Lord Stark before you took his head?" Jaime asked.

"I did. But not instantly," Cersei replied casually. "First I sent Varys to see him with my terms"

"Then I feel honoured," he retorted.

"As you should. Besides, you well know that I didn't ask for the death of Lord Eddard. Not at that time. His death in the Great Sept of Baelor was merely an accident," she knelt next to him and whispered in his ear. "Do not worry. I will let you back to the court and into my bed when you come back to your senses."

"What of your trial?" he asked with genuine concern. Knowing that she deserved to be punished for her crimes and burning her letter where she asked him to be her champion was one thing, but having to be in King's Landing and endure seeing her lose the trial, and with it, her head, was not the same thing at all.

"Ah, that, so you got my letter," she said, amused. "It has been settled. Since you are a cripple and as I now see also a craven, I chose a champion for whom the Faith has so far been unable to find a challenger. No one has volunteered for months. As long as no one does, I am safe. And when they find someone, their champion will die, and I will be found innocent."

"How can you be so certain?"

"Let's say that Ser Robert Strong-"

"-Strong? There's no such name in the Seven Kingdoms!"

"-let's just say that he is even stronger and much more reliable than Ser Gregor used to be," Cersei said with radiant complacency.

The darkness was between them and it could not speak.

"And you would still take a cripple and a craven in your bed?" Jaime had to ask.

"I would take you. No matter what you are," she told him and came so close to his battered face that her lips brushed one corner of his mouth.

He tried to grab her but he once again made a mistake of reaching for her with the hand he didn't have. It made her laugh, wholeheartedly, and in the oppressive quiet of the black cells he remembered all too clearly the thirteen year old girl he had adored.

"Speechless, are you?" she said, satisfied with herself. "You know what you are missing, and you know what you have to say to get it back."

"What about Osney, and Osmund, and that dark haired woman?" he asked in a low voice. "Is it all true?"

"What should I say, sweet brother? I was not given a sword so I use such weapons as I have. I'm sure you have been with whores on your campaigns. That's what they all are, to me."

 _But I didn't,_ thought Jaime, _I've never been with anyone but you. And I've never even told you that, thinking that for you it was the same._

Jaime missed Tyrion with all his heart. He was so smart, and he would know what to do. Now more than ever. Still, he had to try.

"Cersei," he begged her. "I know that you don't want to hear it but you must. I've seen Daenerys Targaryen with my own eyes and a loyal friend of mine saw her dragon. We have to leave. Please."

"Beloved brother," her cold words dug deeper in the gaping pit of differences between them. "Let her come. Tyrion took care of one thing before he killed Joffrey and father and ran off as a traitor scum. We have enough wildfire for both her and her dragon."

With that she left him to ponder her words, always thinking herself to be so smart, precisely at the moments when she was not.

Instead of missing her, Jaime was glad she was gone. And even more glad that he made her angry so she didn't reach for him. He knew that one day when she would, and if he was not going to respond her, he might truly lose his head. And he was decided to keep it on his shoulders for just a little bit longer.

To make Cersei understand.

To save Tommen against all odds.

To find Tyrion, one day.

To see why Brienne had kissed him and if it was only to give him the stone…

He pressed his lips on the black jewel, mindful of its sharp edges, and lay down on the floor, still as the animal saving up its forces before hunting for a new prey. His body felt warmer from that, and he knew it in a heartbeat.

He was resting somewhere very close to the storage of Cersei's wildfire.

**Sansa**

"I found her in one of the worst winesinks right out of the Red Keep when I was listening for the news," Gendry informed the rest of his companions, dragging Lady Brienne on his arm. "The innkeep swore he had served her no wine, only water. She just keeps on repeating how stupid she is and she can't stop crying."

Mance had found them a decent house before nightfall. They shared it with a family of fisherfolk, a young couple with only two children, and plenty of desire to make more of them. It was on the good place, close to the walls of the Red Keep, the city gate and the outside wall of King's Landing, washed incessantly by the restless waves of water leading to the open sea. The company took the ground floor, a broad room where they could lay down pallets for sleeping. The owners would sleep upstairs at night. During day, the ground floor would belong to everyone.

All eyes turned to Sansa. She wondered why women were always supposed to know what to do when someone else was crying.

She had known the lady knight too briefly to be able to offer any meaningful consolation. Still, Sansa was a lady, and a real lady would at least try. That other part of her which was not the lady, but something else entirely, longed for the night to get thicker, so that she may talk to the Hound. They were never alone since they ran away from Harrenhal, and Sansa had been afraid for days of facing the capital again on her own. She took a fancy in imagining that other part of her being as having feral yellow eyes like Nymeria's, trying to convince herself that she, Sansa, Cersei's little dove, could also be fearsome, but it was to no avail. Seeing the walls of King's Landing was enough to make her scared of everything and bring back the memories of beatings and humiliations. On top of it all reigned her terrible guilt for being stupid enough to betray her own father, great and cruel. Yet she would suffer all that in her new company, a thousand times so, rather than be a safe little bird perched behind bars in the Vale, at the mercy of Lord Baelish, waiting to take a new husband in her bed.

Sansa walked to lady Brienne to attempt to do her duty.

"My lady," she told her. "Pray, tell us, what makes you not feel clever? As far as I have known you, you are more learned than most ladies I have met." It was the truth and she managed not to mention that the disciplines Brienne was good at were usually not the ones meant for the ladies.

"Please, excuse me, Lady Sansa," Brienne said between sobs. "It is good that Gendry found me so that I can return the dagger Ser Jaime borrowed from the Elder Brother."

"The Elder Brother left," Sansa said. "He will stay with the High Septon tonight."

Brienne twiddled the hiltless steel in her hand, her face changing colours from white to light green. Sansa made an unconscious step back, in case that Brienne would drop the knife and make Sansa lose one of her fingers. _I would never be able to play the high harp again,_ thought Sansa, dreaming about being somewhere else, in a place where there was still beauty in the world.

"Wait," Brienne called out, staring at the blade as if she had seen something in it, and her tears started drying. "Help me!"

The lady knight's eyes turned to the singer, dry and glaring, and Sansa marvelled at the change.

"You need Ser Jaime for your show, don't you? Than you'll have to find a way to get him out of the black cells where the Queen Regent has put him. But I don't think she means to kill him, at least, only to scare him, and lure him with promises..."

A large tear ran down Brienne's cheek but it was the last one.

"I can try," Mance said. "And I will ask for a favour in exchange."

"I am not much of a lady for giving favours," Brienne muttered and blushed.

"Oh, no offence, my lady, your reputation is safe with me. I had a different favour in mind."

"Name it," she commanded.

"If we get him out, you will read a role with him."

"What role shall I play?" Brienne said bitterly. "His horse?"

"No," Mance explained. "Ser Arthur Dayne's sister. Lady Ashara Dayne. I heard she was almost as tall as you are."

"She was also one of the most beautiful women in the Seven Kingdoms," Brienne reminded them all.

Sansa's words were out of her mouth before she had time to think. "Prince Rhaegar was also one of the most handsome men in the realm. Yet Sandor Clegane is perfect in his role." She realised what she had said and wondered how the Hound would take it. _Probably not very good,_ Sansa thought, staring at the floor.

"What _my lady_ wants to say," Sansa heard him rasp, "is that people will believe even an ugly bugger like me to be a handsome prince if I cover my face good enough and say silly words. The same goes for you."

"If that's what you want, I will read any role if you help Ser Jaime first," Brienne said, as if she had made a holy vow. "Even if you change your mind and make me a serving wench."

"No need to spill good wine," the Hound said, but Sansa noticed, not for the first time since they met again, that he had not been drinking at all.

"You can use the Elder Brother's pallet for the night," Gendry offered, and the lady knight nodded, gifting them all with an uncertain smile.

**Sandor**

Sandor found Sansa sitting on the high stone threshold at the entrance, in the hour of the wolf when even Nymeria seemed to be sleeping. Her words about his ugliness stung him profoundly, not so the tone of her voice, softer than summer rain. He was not handsome, there was nothing to say about that. But she had also called him perfect, whatever that meant in her little chirping head.

And all that had passed between them since the Quiet Isle has just further addled his brains. If another woman kissed him like Sansa did in Harrenhal, he would have taken her right under the heart tree and the watchers could go to seven hells when he was concerned. But she was Sansa, so, as always, he wanted to do something, but he had no idea what he should do.

So he sat on the porch next to her and glared into the darkness. The moon had not risen. The breeze, while still warmer than in the snow affected riverlands, turned perceptibly colder in the long time that had passed since he had run away from the city.

"We are back," she said, saving him the trouble of having to say something first.

"Aye," he grunted.

"I never thought I would go back."

"Same here," he chuckled, feeling his face twitch, seeing her face turn slightly away even if she could barely see him in the moonless night. His stomach burned. "What? Should I _retire_ so that my unpleasantness does not disturb _my lady?"_

 _"_ No," she simply said, as if that explained all.

And than she said, after a minute of silence that the breeze used diligently to freshen their brows, tired after the long time on the road: "I was waiting for you."

"Were you now? To do what? Kiss me again?" he laughed at his own stupid joke, not caring how his face looked when he did so. "No need for that now."

"Is it true what Mance said about how you speak where you are from?"

"The wildling has his way of seeing things, and I never thought of it in that way, but yes. You could say it is one good way to describe the westermen, while not entirely true."

"Ah," she said, blue gaze staring at the night.

"Although I am different than most in that as well. You called me hateful once, I believe, and that's what I am, in word and deed. Ser Jaime, on the other hand, talks far worse than he is. Tell me, girl, is what Mance said true for you in the north as well?"

"As one way of describing it," she admitted, carefully.

"So if you kissed me once in a mummery, would that mean you would do it two more times?" he sneered and choked on his words, and on the pathetic longing he suffered from, hoping she would say yes.

"I don't know about that," she said, sounding honest. "But I wondered about one other thing."

"About what?"

The silence was thick with air smelling of the sea, like in Lannisport, when the tide was high flooding the streets.

"I wondered if you would kiss me. Not in a mummery," she said and half-looked into his face. "Kiss me as Sandor would kiss Sansa."

Nothing had ever shocked him more, not even when Gregor killed their sister.

She said it in that honourable tone he was never able to stand without getting angry. And Sansa was still such a terrible liar except when she read the songs. Then again, she believed the songs to be true, so they were not lies in her pretty head.

Which left only one possible explanation for her words.

They were the truth, plain and simple.

She would not be able to see him, and it was for the better. Easier. And he would not have to see her eyes turning away.

He never closed his own eyes when he put his hands in her hair and returned the kiss she bestowed on him in Harrenhal, fearing for someone else's life. _She asked for it,_ he thought, reason retreating, when he launched the onslaught of her heart shaped face.

She was in his arms again, no masks, no audience, only the salty smelling darkness. _I'd never want to breathe again after we finish this,_ the Hound knew. The air seemed impure and unworthy after inhaling her scent.

Her breath turned ragged, and he abruptly stayed the madness before it would all get way out of hand. _Why not?_ a voice said in his mind. _She wants it. They all do._ "Because I'm not Gregor," he replied to the voice, but it came out loud and embarrassing.

She heard him and started pulling away. He let her go and felt the rise of melancholy as he always would with her when his sick hopes would first stir and than crumble down. But she didn't go far, she just nestled into his arms and looked again into the darkness before them.

"And yes," she said, "I would kiss you as often as needed in the mummery. In exchange for a kindness, since we both seem to have trouble sleeping here-"

He couldn't fathom what else she would possibly want from him.

"-that you do this as often as we are alone and the gods see fit for us to stay together in King's Landing. To keep the ghosts of the dead away."

She sounded more serious than the late Lord Stark did when dealing out king's justice in his short-lived service as the Hand of the King

"This?" he asked and did it again, allowing himself more freedom, nuzzling her face, biting her lips, bending her mouth to his will for a fleeting moment. The whores and the wenches would not allow any of it to the likes of him. The mass of his scars touched the perfection of her face, and her only reaction was to hold onto him, her fingers entangled in his black tunic, in his black hair.

"If the others see us," he managed to drop in, to save a little bit of pride he still had left, "we can always say we're practising for the show."


	22. The Hall of Lamps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the Faith launches things in motion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who put a kudos or bothered to comment this story. On we go :-)

**Jaime**

Jaime didn't know how long he slept, or if it was the next day or the day after his imprisonment. In the black cells there was no difference. Only the warmth of the wildfire remained. He touched the black pendant for no reason at all, and all of a sudden, his eyes could see.

"Don't slap him that hard," shouted the northern singer in front of a modest house somewhere in the city. "You're teasing him for his stupidity, you don't want to break his nose. Again!"

"Lady Ashara," Ser Hyle Hunt announced cockily to Brienne, whose hips swayed too gently in tight breeches. "You have not yet met a man who is man enough. Let me show you how the old gods have made us, descendants of the First Men, fierce and strong."

Undeterred by the slap that Jaime missed, the knight tried to kiss her, only to meet a slap so hard that Jaime's cheek started hurting in the dungeons of the Red Keep.

"No!" Mance yelled again, but Ser Hyle looked so pitiful that he seemed to have changed his mind and only waved to the players to continue reading.

"My lord," Ashara Dayne said to Brandon Stark, and Jaime could almost imagine Ser Arthur's sister, proud, tall and fair beyond count. "The women in Dorne are different from all others, all the realm knows about it. Do not seek peril in coming after one. We are made of sand, and the sand will slip through your hands and leave you with nothing. Man of the north, best return home."

"All the realm talks how the blood of the women in Dorne runs hot, and not of sand at all. Show me, Lady Ashara. Give me a little taste. No one will know."

"The sand is hot, but not for you, my lord. Get out of my chambers now if you don't want to wait for Dawn. My brother's sword _will_ find you, firstborn son of a lord or not."

"It's your loss, my lady," Brandon Stark said, winking cheerfully. "I will not bar the door to my chambers, should you change your mind."

Jaime dropped the pendant and the darkness returned. Eager to continue his vision of Brienne, even if it involved Hyle Hunt, he nervously groped on the floor and found it again. With childlike adoration, he held it to his chest, and his vision cleared.

Brienne and Ser Hyle stood in daylight, near the city walls, under the blue sky sinking in the vastness of the sea.

"I'm sorry," she told him, plain and well spoken, as if she talked to an old friend. "For hitting you hard. Mummery is for ladies, not for me."

"My lady," Ser Hyle said with a friendly smile, "I have known you for a while and I can abide your nature. It pleases me greatly that we meet again so that I can pay my respects and reiterate my marriage offer. Tarth needs heirs and you would find me a most undemanding husband."

Jaime's delight faded, and before he could see her answering, presumably in acceptance, he smashed the pendant on the floor of the cell right on the place where he had slept. Anger ran through him like a demon made of swirling fire, but even so he could hear the cracking of the stone.

Something was wrong. The obsidian pendant was very sharp, and instead of ruining the damn thing as he intended, Jaime had made a fissure on the floor.

Interest in what was under took over all other confused ideas and images in his head. He ferociously set himself to widen the passage further, in a schooled stubborn motion of too many days spent learning how to be a son, under the ever watchful eye of his now dead father.

**Elder Brother**

The Elder Brother stood vigil in the Great Sept of Baelor, in front of the Father's altar. That face had always been his, despite how much he cherished all aspects of the gods as their faithful servant. He was not alone in that: every time he came to the capital, many candles were lit to the Father, distant and yet protective of his sons.

When the Elder Brother came the night before, a gaunt young septon told him that His Holiness would receive him shortly but than he was left alone to ponder about the Seven Faces of the One God for the duration of the night. It was good. It helped him clear his mind, stirred during travel and the company he kept in the depths he rarely needed to access in the Quiet Isle.

Walking up Vysenia's Hill woke up much older memories of many earlier trips to King's Landing, and many different High Septons. This one, the latest one, was his friend, a wandering septon from the riverlands. A short skinny man eager to help the poor, whom the destiny and the rebellion of the sparrows elevated to the highest honour against the usual plotting of the court. The outcome made the Elder Brother strangely pleased.

Morning crept in through the high windows, and the Elder Brother remained alone. Barefoot, he ventured from the sept proper into its antechamber, the Hall of Lamps. _Something must have happened to my friend for not coming to meet me despite sending the message to the contrary_ , he thought.

"Elder Brother," another very thin aged septon greeted him, scrubbing the floor.

"I am not sure that I have had the pleasure-" the Elder Brother could not recognise him.

"-I am Torbert, remember. The penitence is hard on us sinners."

"Septon Torbert," the monk from the Quiet Isle acknowledged the bony septon, trying not to show the surprise at how he could have lost all of his weight in a rather short time. Septon Torbert he remembered was so plump that he could barely move. He must have been born a fat babe and he never lost a pound as a man grown.

"I should have voted for you... I was a fool..." Septon Torbert spoke between teeth, looking around as if he were afraid of invisible eyes and ears.

His incoherent speech was interrupted by the opening of the main door from the plaza outside the sept to the Hall of Lamps. The Elder Brother's recently elevated friend, albeit short of stature, entered wearing simple patched robes, followed by Ser Bonifer Hasty. The High Septon stared first at the Elder Brother's feet. An unspoken admonition died on his lips seeing they were bare just like his own, horny and callused spiders of grey and brown skin.

"Your Holiness," the Elder Brother said bowing to kiss the fingers of his superior unprovoked by his inquisitive stare.

"We are honoured, friend," His Holiness said finally, "we were told that your vigil was impeccable."

The statement made the Elder Brother wonder not only why Septon Torbert had become skin and bones beyond measure, but even more so why should anyone spy on the vigil of others. It was a simple act of devotion done in solitude, dear to the heart of a simple Seven-loving monk as the Elder Brother always saw himself in all honesty.

"There is no higher honour than to stand before the faces of the Seven, here in their magnificent home," replied the Elder Brother, serene, his cowl on as was proper when addressing His Holiness.

"Ser Bonifer mentioned to us you protected a sinner from the far north, a man wanted for his crimes against the realm, what do you say?"

Septon Torbert crawled away from them, polishing the floor as he went, in subservience and palpable fear.

They ventured in the main part of the sept, standing in the middle, illuminated by the blessed first light of a new day, spreading its glory through the high windows and the holy crystals in bright tones of a rainbow. The Elder Brother found his chance to answer:

"That man was a wildling who should be brought to King Tommen, not judged by Lord Baelish who should himself stand the trial of the Faith, as you well know, Your Holiness. I recall you saying that he cared not for the people of the riverlands. And the wildling revealed another sin against the gods Lord Baelish committed, sending an innocent girl up north to marry a madman."

"Ah, yes, we have heard. That has been foul indeed," the sharp face of his friend turned stern and his muddy brown eyes frowned. "What of the Hound who killed and raped in Saltpans? I heard that you protected him too."

The Elder Brother relayed the true story of the Saltpans in great detail, observing how the face of Ser Bonifer slowly sunk and the face of his friend, the avatar of the gods, grew more worried with every word.

"We are glad that you could have joined us, brother," His Holiness said, "or we could have made a terrible mistake and pronounced an anathema on the soul of Sandor Clegane. Unless he would repent and choose to serve the Faith as its champion."

"I am certain Ser Bonifer had only the best interest of the Faith in his mind when he suggested something like that," the monk from the Quiet Isle said, gaining awareness that the sept was not getting full of septons, septas, silent sisters or visiting monks in prayer as it normally should have in the morning. Instead, five or six Warrior's Sons walked in and encircled them from afar, some lingering at the altars in silent prayer, some lurking at the three men in the middle, as if waiting for a sign of His Holiness.

"Before we were elevated to this high office by the will of the Seven, some sparrows suggested you, Elder Brother, for the function we now have," the High Septon said in a voice as gnarled as his bare feet.

The Elder Brother had prayed the entire night, and his penitent looked matched His Holiness point by point, unforced and natural. "That would be most undeserving," he said. "But I would like to beg Your Holiness to give me leave, to continue protecting the innocents as we used to do together when we both walked the riverlands."

"In due time, Elder Brother," his superior said. "Tell me, has Sandor Clegane sworn the vows of the Faith?"

"No. He accepted the shelter and the cowl not to offend our community by his attire, but he never took any vows. He served us digging graves."

"How unfortunate," the High Septon sighed profoundly.

"I don't understand," began the Elder Brother, noticing the Warrior's Sons approaching him.

Ser Bonifer proudly wore a thin-lipped awkward smile.

The door to the main part of the sept coming from the Hall of Lamps burst open as if it had been forced to do so.

In the doorway stood Sandor Clegane, bare-faced, black hair shining with youth it had never known, looking like a man on his marriage day. Greatsword was hauled on his back, in a huge soot-black scabbard over his brown robes of the Faith. After him came a dozen of sparrows, their eyes full of adoration. A few septas peered shyly to the inside, standing behind the little birds of the Faith.

 _I think in his words,_ the Elder Brother realised, recalling the piercing cries of a man dying who only wanted his little bird; the Brother Gravedigger who stayed alive against all odds and followed the Elder Brother as a shadow ever since, in silent gratitude for keeping his life.

"Your Holiness," Sandor Clegane said with a sneer, kneeling in front of the High Septon in a way that no one could question the propriety of his gesture despite the extreme mocking in his voice. He covered his face with a hood then, and went straight to the lonely altar of the Stranger bringing several golden dragons, and a single candle, which he had to light on those still burning on the altar of the Crone.

"The Hound!" Ser Bonifer yelped and the man whose name was called out responded flatly. "We are here to adore in silence. I came to pray to the face of the Seven Faced God with which the gods have blessed me. And to beg His Holiness for a public absolution regarding Saltpans. The Elder Brother will confirm-"

"-he already said so," the High Septon inserted with unhidden impatience. The Elder Brother noticed that some of the Warrior's Sons had hands on the star-adorned-pommels of their swords and for a second the house of the gods seemed more sinister than the black halls of Harrenhal.

"Stand down, my sons," His Holiness ordered his swords.

The candle lit to the Stranger was born to life under the crystals of the sept, when white daylight finally shone in all corners, powerful and brighter than fire.

The morning was over, and the shadows of the darkness gone.

"You are the legend of the riverlands, the Elder Brother," said one of the sparrows who had come in.

"You cured a deadly plague in my village," said another.

The Elder Brother turned to face the sparrows, his hood half lowered from the movement. A septa fainted in the background and another helped her to stand up.

"I did nothing," the old monk said, adjusting his robes to cover his face. "I merely obeyed the will of the Seven. Please step away, someone is in need of help right there."

And so the Elder Brother walked out of the main hall of the Great Sept of Baelor back to the Hall of Lamps. The sparrows pushed themselves forward to touch his robes, whispering exaggerated stories of his good deeds.

"Calm down, brothers, we all work for the glory of the Seven, none of us is any better than the other," he told them, realizing they all held axes in the holy place. "Why are you armed here? I came empty handed to worship."

"We are sworn to High Holines as the Order of the Star reborn," one of the sparrows stated proudly. "And them are the Order of the Sword", another pointed to the Warrior's Sons.

The Elder Brother looked at His Holiness with an untold question in his charcoal dark eyes which saw everything.

"Brother," the avatar of the gods answered the unspoken plea, "you said many times when we wandered the Riverlands together that the gods cannot do everything alone. We have to labour as well. What better way to protect the weak than to arm the servants of the Faith?"

"Your Holiness," the Elder Brother said politely, but the tone of his voice was iron, "with so many swords around, what will a few more achieve? You may only create another army in an ongoing war. And where there are more armies, they tend to use their arms against each other."

"The demands of the Faith are sometimes great," said the High Septon, caressing his brown and grey beard, closely trimmed to fit his face.

The Elder Brother found that maybe, that man he had known and loved, that septon he had admired, was no longer his friend. Or they had both changed with the seasons, in ways only gods could explain.

"In your wisdom, you know best, Your Holiness," he said, wishing to reconcile with his superior. He had been on the Quiet Isle for too long. Maybe the rebirth of the Faith Militant was the right way forward.

When the Elder Brother moved to check on the septa who fainted, she was gone. Only a dark skinned young septa still stood behind the sparrows. "Septa Lemore has travelled to King's Landing from afar," she said, "please, forgive her distress. Seeing High Holiness in person has proven too much for her fragile condition."

"His Holiness will be glad to meet such devoted septas," said the Elder Brother. "May I take a look at Septa Lemore to ensure that she is in good health?"

"She made a vow of silence, and a vow of not showing her face at all for a fortnight, in a sign of penitence. She withdrew in meditation for the rest of this day," answered the other one.

"Young Septa Tyene is very wise and you can trust her advice in all matters, brother," His Holiness said from the back. "She was of immense help in accusing the Queen Regent of her heinous crimes."

"When is the trial taking place?" the Elder Brother asked. "I wish to return to the riverlands when it is done."

"Now that depends," Septa Tyene said. "When the Faith finds a worthy champion," the High Septon finished her thought. "The Kingsguard member to fight for the queen is very strong. _Cursed,_ some say."

"Please, Elder Brother, come out to meet the rest of us sparrows who are here on the plaza even if the main force is now in the field, fighting for the poor!" pleaded the sparrow whose village had suffered from plague.

The Elder Brother stepped out, on to the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor, overlooking the plaza and the statue of Baelor the Blessed. Too many eyes looked at him, and he desired to leave and be invisible. Sandor Clegane suddenly appeared behind his back, shielding him from harm.

Ser Bonifer said: "Dog, is your prayer over?"

"That is Clegane to you, Hasty," the Hound barked, "or my offer to draw my sigil in your skin still stands. Don't take me upon it."

"Brothers," the Elder Brother told all the sparrows, three dozens of them gathered at the stairs, "it pleases me to come to the capital after many years and to see the men of Faith in such numbers. May the Seven appoint a worthy champion to fight for the Faith on the trial of the queen."

The monk started descending the high steps followed by the dark shadow of the Hound. He hid his face completely and was tempted to turn around and check if the insistent stare he felt on his back belonged to the holy old eyes colour of mud or to a confused septa.

"May the Seven hear your voice, brother," repeated the pious voice of the High Septon, clearing the monk's suspicions about his old friend, not betraying any ill will at all. "I will absolve Sandor Clegane of his sins, and he can leave the shelter of the Faith if he so wishes."

"And for that I am grateful. Undeserving as I am of the mercy of the Seven, I yet dare to pray to them to hear my voice and do as they please," the Elder Brother replied bowing deeply to His Holiness.

The Hound only nodded in acknowledgement, not bending an inch. _Tall as a sentinel of the North,_ the Elder Brother thought, and wondered when he had seen the sentinels in his previous life. The memory felt real yet he could not put it in place, or in time.

The monk walked down the hill, chasing the fleeting blasphemous thought that the clear light of the day in the open air was ten times more beautiful than all the candles and the crystals of the Seven.

Sandor Clegane walked two steps behind him. When they were on the bottom of the hill, the burned man visibly let his high shoulders slump and spoke gruffly. "Come on, brother, I'll show you where Mance put us. Unless you want to spend every night you have to stay in the capital in the sept or chatting with the sparrows and withered septas."

"Why did you come after me? Pardon me, brother, but you don't care about the absolution of the Faith you have just received. I always knew I was going to have to demand it in your stead," the monk asked, curious about his brother's motivation.

"A dog can sniff trouble," the animal's namesake answered. "I could not sleep. I thought I would find you in the sept so I went there. Then I saw the door barred, and the sparrows waiting outside. You know the rest."

"I am glad you came, brother," the Elder Brother said, relieved in his turn, not certain from what he had been saved yet again by the will of the gods. "And now I want to find something worthy of doing while I am forced to wait for the queen's trial. Let's visit the poor of King's Landing!"

**Brienne**

"Don't worry," Mance told Brienne, "I understand now that when someone believes me that I come from White Harbor it means he is not particularly bright. The commander of the gold cloaks will not suspect a thing."

Brienne wore a rough-spun dress she brought from Harrenhal, her face was smeared with soot and her hair stood more prickly than usual.

"It looks like the Queen Regent had all the previous gaolers killed, but now she wants to hire one to feed her brother for the time she intends to keep him in the dungeons. She requested an ugly woman."

The Lady of Tarth looked every bit as ugly as Cersei wanted, her blue eyes big from crying and the lack of sleep.

"Are you sure she's a woman?" the commander of the gold cloaks asked when they arrived to the gates of the Red Keep.

"I checked it thoroughly last night," Mance said, ignoring Brienne's hurt expression. She can be quite ferocious, I tell you." Mance made a growl and a jump as if he were a beast.

"Have it your way, singer. You helped us solve a problem and you can play for the garrison tonight if you so wish."

"I'm glad I can be of service," Mance grinned, nudging Brienne decisively towards the door.

Two other gold cloaks ushered her in, down the way she had crossed before, following Jaime. She was given a platter of food and left in front of a cell door with a ring of keys and no torch.

"Crawl back up when you are done," a gold cloak jeered.

She waited for them to be gone before trying all the keys in the hole. When the door finally opened and her eyes were a bit more adjusted to darkness, she entered and called him.

"Jaime," she stuttered, still unused to call him out loud the way she started calling him in her thoughts.

He was not there. She must have been in the wrong cell. She made a step back but the soil was slippery, making her slide. Catching one of the walls, she kept balance and the tray of food in her hands.

A hand touched her ankle from _below_ and she was afraid. "Leave me," she said, trying to hide her fear, thinking if she should aim the tray at her attacker. Maybe the gold cloaks took her to some beast left from the age of Targaryens that the smallfolk whispered about.

"Is it you, my lady?" a familiar voice said from under and Brienne could breathe again.

"I brought you some food," she rattled, finding it difficult to say meaningful things to Jaime when all she wanted was to ensure his safety.

"Good to hear that", he said. "I went for a walk and I am hungrier than a lion. Step back and sit down next to the wall. There is a passage down here which I have to close after me."

Brienne did as she was told and after some sounds of pulling he was seated next to her, moving with assuredness of a cat who could see in the dark.

"All I could see was darkness," she said. "I was afraid that the Queen Regent changed her mind and that she put you away for real."

"Shh! I saw you talking to Ser Hyle… It's the pendant, right?" he asked for confirmation.

"The pendant, and the dagger," she gave him the explanation gladly. "I noticed in the caves and in Harrenhal. I could see what you were doing."

"So could I," Jaime said, removing the platter with food from her confused hands.

"And since I have the pleasure to be awarded a most charming gaoler," he continued, "know that as your brother in the mummers' farce I would never let you succumb to the dubious charms of Ser Hyle, or Brandon Stark, or anyone else."

"We only read the scene when Brandon boosts to Ashara about his manly virtues and she is teasing him to prove himself. The singer asked it of me in exchange of arranging this position for me. It goes with a set of keys to free you," she said. "You can take my dress and go up now. Our sizes match."

"Wearing a dress does not appeal to me, my lady. I so find that they fit you much better. Some of them, at least," he teased her but there was kindness, and hidden resentment in his voice.

"And what will happen when Cersei finds you here in my place?"he asked her, more composed this time. "Believe me, she is not the forgiving kind. Besides, that little pendant is a sharp thing. It helped me open a way to a passage I wish to explore further. I think I will enjoy the black cells hospitality for just a bit longer, on one condition," Jaime whispered nervously as if the walls could hear him if he raised his tone.

"And that is?" she inquired timidly, feeling the warmth of him next to her face as if he puffed out small clouds of fire.

"That you come and feed me every day. You can tell Mance how grateful I am to him for arranging this prosperous position for you and that in exchange I will read whatever platitudes he put in Dayne's mouth when I am out of here… in a while…" Jaime said merrily.

Brienne tried to get the platter back and give it to him, but a touch of a stump stayed her hand.

"Meanwhile," he said in a rough voice. "The kind of food I had in mind was a bit different."

Perfect lips touched Brienne's full ones forcing them to open. It was nothing like the knightly kisses she imagined in her solitary nights in Tarth, all chaste and cold, in sign of proper and measured devotion. Her body glowed from his touch and she imagined she would go alight as a torch the gold cloaks didn't give her.

The precision she needed for sword fight returned and helped her to move a tray to a safe distance from a tangle of long arms in the dark, and her mind was swerving with thoughts of how twisted it all was, and how completely lost she was.

And how he was truly strong enough.

"Brienne," he said coarsely, breaking his kiss, pressing his lips on her bitten cheek. "I saw you with Ser Hyle and I couldn't take it. I know I have no honour and that I carry my family past on my shoulders. I cannot and I will not forsake what is left of it even if I have to force it on Cersei and Tommen to accept my help."

"But I am still asking you this, selfish as it may be," he stopped lacking the force to continue.

"What?" she said, surprised at the tenderness in her own voice she was not used to hear leaving her mouth very often.

"I am asking you to wait. Don't marry Ser Hyle. Don't marry. Please."

"On one condition," she managed to say, unable to process the magnitude of his demand.

"Name it," he said, more serious than a septon.

"That you eat your dinner," she punched back and enjoyed how his body twitched in an uncontrolled laughter between her arms, certain she would make them continue where they stopped when he would finish his meal. He still needed to tell her _why_ he wanted to remain in prison.

 _After all, the ladies do favour their knights with kisses_ , she thought when he finally accepted the platter, refusing to give in to the creeping belief that what they started was wrong, and that the gods would surely find a way to punish them.

**Sansa**

"My lady, the heralds," Gendry said to Sansa who had been looking for Sandor the entire day, to no avail.

She had fallen asleep in the Hound's arms, and he must have carried her inside. Where he went after that, she did not know.

 _He is very strong,_ she tried to convince herself, _nothing could have happened to him._

 _So was your father,_ said Queen Cersei's voice in her head, and Joffrey's dead face laughed madly, choking on a piece of his wedding pie.

"The heralds, my lady," Gendry repeated, breathless from running back to the fishermen's house from the more central parts of the town. "They are proclaiming it everywhere, with drums and flutes. The Faith has found the champion to fight for the Seven against the champion of the queen."

"And who is the champion of the queen?" Sansa bleated, feeling grey as the colour of her house.

"A new sworn brother of the Kingsguard, called Ser Robert Strong. No one has seen his face because he covers it with a white helm specially made to fit the man of his size. People whisper that no one can withstand him."

"His size?" Sansa repeated, dread pulling in her stomach.

"They say that the knight is over eight feet tall."

There was only one man over eight feet tall in all Westeros and Sansa had seen him almost killing Ser Loras Tyrell at the tourney of the Hand. Ser Gregor, Sandor's brother, the Mountain That Rides. Only he was supposed to be dead, killed by Prince Oberyn Martell, and his head sent to Dorne, shortly after Sansa stopped living as a ward of the crown.

And there was only one thing left to ask before the inevitable would hit her again, her, Sansa, bound to lose everything she held dear, in payment for being a stupid girl and betraying her father. _Sandor, Sandor, Sandor, he was going to fight his brother, an abomination in life, and, seemly, in death._

"Who is the champion of the Faith?" Sansa asked, admiring that her own voice did not falter.

"Now that is a strange thing," Gendry said, and Sansa's tummy turned in expectation. "The gods have named a holy man to hold high the lamp of the Faith, or so says the High Septon."

"Holy? It can't be… He isn't… He never swore any vows!" Sansa could not understand.

"He looked holy enough to me," Gendry offered his opinion on the matter. "The heralds announce the champion of the Faith to be the Elder Brother from the Quiet Isle."


	23. The Champion of the Faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Sandor loses it a bit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for bad language

**Septa Lemore**

"Ashara, wake up," said Tyene Sand, nervously scratching her headdress worthy of a devoted septa, which lay heavy on her hair like a nest of exotic birds. "You haven't been well."

A septa with grey eyes which could have been purple in a different light stood up nervously from a humble wooden pallet in a dwelling they both occupied in the grey home of the Faith only a few streets away from the Great Sept of Baelor. The ashy interior could not be more different than the airy spaces adorned with precious crystals where the faithful of the Seven gathered to worship.

"The foreign monk wanted to examine you by force," Tyene continued. "I didn't let him."

"You did well," Septa Lemore said to her younger companion. "The fewer people know about me, the better. And you should remember not to use that name. Lemore is a better one."

"As if the monk would know Lady Ashara Dayne," the darker of the two women said stubbornly. "Tyene!" her friend protested, making the same mistake by not calling the younger woman Septa Tyene.

The natural daughter of Prince Oberyn Martell, graceful as a sandstorm, was not intimidated at all by the four grey-coloured and possibly hollow walls of their room. "He may be older than you but you have been thought dead since the Usurper came to the Iron Throne. In the unlikely case that he would recognise you, I did some asking about the Elder Brother from the Quiet Isle. He was a miserable hedge knight from the Reach, called Randyll, imagine, like old soldier Tarly. The only good thing about him is that he had the common sense to fight in Rhaegar's army at the Trident. He has turned into an insipid benefactor and healer of the poor ever since."

"In truth, my blood ran cold of how the High Septon looked at that monk. If looks could kill, his would. I wouldn't want him to look at Aegon that way," the other woman complained. "Not in a thousand years!"

"High Septon is ours," Tyene said with conviction. "We need him to give his blessing to Aegon before Daenerys comes. Than hopefully his aunt should accept his claim and the kingdoms will be spared a clash among the living Targaryens..."

"Blessings, claims, kingdoms, living Targaryens…" Septa Lemore sighed. "Jon sent a raven that Aegon went missing on a fool's errand in the riverlands. After so much grooming he proves as reckless as his father. They found him in a strange company which he refused to leave."

"What company?"

"Jon wouldn't tell in a letter. Ravens have wings and walls have ears. Nothing is safe."

"That much is true," Tyene agreed but there was more on her mind and she would bring it forward as was her wont. "Be as it may, we will see soon enough. But tell me, why did the looks of that monk upset you so? Don't lie to me, _Septa Lemore._ It was not the High Septon at first."

An answer was long forthcoming in the gloom.

"Among other things, he reminded me of my brother," the older woman finally said, turning her back on Tyene to stare through the sole small window of the room. "It was as if a dead man rose to life in front of my eyes."

"Forgive me, but Arthur was almost as silver-haired as Rhaegar, more so than his living cousin Gerold Dayne the Darkstar, and also very handsome. This monk was so barren and bald. He had no spice at all, my friend. The only thing I found appealing was the iron colour of his voice. The kind that people would listen to. Was that the voice of your brother?"

"I think so..." Septa Lemore said softly. "I haven't heard Arthur for so long that I have almost forgotten the sound of his voice. Sad, isn't it? How everything is forgotten and the debts of blood are not paid..."

"They will be.." the new thought of Tyene Sand was cut in half by the mighty calls of a herald, drumming on the street under the window of their cell, small and cramped, with only two hard beds and four walls of stone.

_"…to hold high the lamp of the Crone!"_

"Others take me," Septa Lemore cursed, listening carefully to the proclamation, leaning to the window sill for balance.

" _The Elder Brother from the Quiet Isle! The champion chosen by His Holiness the High Septon to fight against Ser Robert Strong, the champion of the Queen Regent!"_

"Maybe you were right about fearing His Holiness, Ashara," Tyene commented. "He does seem to have a way of dealing with his enemies. This is no good. Cersei will still be alive and well when Aegon arrives if this mockery of the trial takes place. Blood will flow when he takes the capital! That monk is as much of a soldier as I am a man! He cannot hope to win!"

"Tyene, listen to me," the older woman said with passion, turning away from the drums and the flutes below to face her friend. "That monk is not my brother, but assuming for the moment that he was, which weapon did Arthur wield even better than Dawn?"

"His lance, of course, Arthur was excellent in jousting, almost as good as Rhaegar who was the best of his time, but why…"

"Tyene, do me this favour. Think of this monk as Arthur come to life and you will serve Aegon's cause well. Go and do what you know best, convince the High Septon that the fight should be a joust, at the plaza of the sept, for instance. Tell him some sweet words of how the poor love jousting, so it will make them love him all the more."

"Why don't you give him Arthurs's sword if you fancy him to be your brother?" Tyene could not understand.

"I intended to surrender Dawn to Aegon when he takes the capital. It is high time to do that. I am sure that both Arthur and Rhaegar would approve if they were alive."

"Sound idea. Valyrian steel for the last son of the old Valyria…If we forget for a moment that a daughter of old Valyria is coming after all of us riding a dragon…" Tyene frowned thoughtfully and the wrinkles on her young forehead resembled the ever changing movement of the hot sand in the faraway deserts of Dorne.

"Daenerys is a woman. She will have understanding," Septa Lemore observed.

"Targaryens never had any. It is an idle hope. Our only hope lies in crowning Aegon before she claims the throne for herself."

"One Targaryen had a kind word for everything and everyone," Lemore said, melancholy taking hold of her dark eyes.

"Yes, and for that he ended up dead in the Trident before the Usurper burned his body. The great river ran red with blood of friend and foe for days. Pieces of Rhaegar's funeral pyre drifted in the stream, together with the rubies from his armour, as prey for brigands and beasts! Daenerys knows all that and she will seek revenge. She razed the whole cities to the ground across the water!" Tyene sat on the window sill in a very non septa-like manner, lithe tanned legs protruding from under her robes. "Prince Quentyn perished on the way and failed to approach her on time. She will not believe that Aegon is her nephew whom Varys saved from certain death. Especially if the Usurper's son in all but blood, Tommen Baratheon, _and_ his mother, are still alive, and Varys again a mere servant at their court. Now, if Lyanna and her baby didn't die at birth, then maybe…"

"All that is old history, Tyene," Septa Lemore said with dryness that killed the argument, more deadly than the looks of His Holiness could ever be.

In a much lighter tone, she continued. "Right now, you're going to visit the High Septon, or I will change into a peasant wench and get you to a winesink. These robes grow heavy on you. You should take a lover! It would make you talk less."

"And risk that some sparrow catches me in the act?"

"Tyene, Tyene, Tyene, constant penitence has made you cold," older septa mocked her friend. "And then you mock _me_ that since I lived across the sea, I no longer sound like a woman from Dorne."

"Ashara," Tyene promised, forgetting again that she should not use the older woman's name, "when this is over we will ride fast to Sunspear on swift horses from Uncle Doran, and have all the lovers we want. You can even take your bald monk of the Seven if that is your desire!"

With the last words Tyene slipped down from the window, and out of the room, missing a sewing needle that the other woman threw after her by a tiny inch.

**Sandor**

They have heard the heralds first while the Elder Brother was about to deliver a baby in Flea Bottom. Sandor Clegane stood immobile, watching and listening, petrified in an old habit of a sworn shield, witnessing how despite having heard every single word of the calls, the monk from the Quiet Isle did not blink an eye. He laboured with the woman, teaching her to breathe, hands full on, until his task was finished and a new born boy cleaned and safely tucked in his mother's arms.

"What is your name, brother?" the new mother asked, weak from the loss of blood. "I would wish to give him your name. At least one of us would have died without your help."

"I gave it up to serve the gods-" he started to explain, but a woman would not hear it. "Please, brother. You must still remember your name. Everyone does."

A dark-skinned septa, whose advice the High Septon recommended to them earlier, appeared running in the narrow street. She must have overheard the conversation for the home of the new mother and her son was more a half-open shelter from the rain, than a house of any kind.

"Name him Arthur," she gave an unsolicited piece of advice to the woman. "It's a good name. Better than Randyll."

"It is a good name," Elder Brother could agree, and in a curious manner the Hound would not expect from him, he wanted to know more. "Septa Tyene, how do you know the name my mother gave me?"

"Everyone knows the champion of the Faith," the young septa smirked in both amusement and malice, and simply ran further, swifter than a snake.

"Come," the Hound finally found his burnt voice. "Stop pretending you didn't hear it. You swore once not to speak, but never to close your eyes and ears. Not even your gods can ask for that."

They ended up seated in the first winesink they could find, in the place where the poorest of the poor in King's Landing spent their lives. Sandor led the way, placid as a good host tending to a guest just arrived to an unknown city. The Elder Brother did not object, thus betraying he'd been somewhat affected by the proclamation in the very least. Soon both men nursed a small flagon of Dornish sour, and the eyes and the nostrils of the Hound widened strangely at the smell and the taste of wine long forgotten.

"I will fight in your stead," Sandor Clegane said to the Elder Brother, in a voice that brooked no disagreement. "That's what His Holy Arse wants."

"That's what he may have wanted before this morning," the Elder Brother corrected him gently. "But the champion of the Faith has to belong to the Faith. You made no vows. I spoke imprudently on the stairs of the sept and it was easy to announce my name as the one chosen by the gods. The sparrows will spread the news to all corners of the town and make it impossible for me to refuse with honour. I should better prepare and meditate in silence. The gods will guide my hand."

"Honour!" Sandor Clegane scorned the silly notion. "What does honour have to do with anything?"

The Hound could not stand the meekness with which the Elder Brother seemed to accept his adverse fate, with the same placid condescension that he always imagined Sansa must have shown when she walked right into her marriage bed and spread her legs out wide for the Imp. So he tried again, fighting hard to muster his anger and speak with reason. "They say that the queen's champion is taller than my late brother and I have told you everything there was to know about him when he was merely a mercenary killing for Lord Tywin or for his own account. Ser Robert Strong is not a noble name, he could be called Waters, or Rivers, or Snow for all I care. This is some witchcraft, it has to be."

"He is a member of the Kingsguard, there is no way that the king would shame himself so by naming a bastard, or worse-" the Elder Brother objected. "-What do you expect from the Boy King and the Whore Queen?" the Hound spat out. "Cersei would have had a bear named to be a sworn Brother of the Kingsguard if it would save her lion cunt! Even one of those grumkins of the north if she could get her hands on it to serve her needs… And Tommen probably still thinks that the royal seal is a handsome toy..."

The shared memory of the blue-eyed foe made of ice turned their talk silent, almost unreal in the golden autumn of the capital where the only thing molesting the joy of the senses was the insistent stench of the streets around them. The twisting alleys of Flea Bottom were the only place in Westeros where the contents of the chamber pots emptied behind the houses stank as much as did the people.

"But the High Septon is my friend," the Elder Brother announced, believing every word.

"Aye," the Hound found the only possible answer to _that_ , turning his burns towards his adoptive brother. "And Gregor was my brother."

"Whatever," the monk finally said, way too briefly, with odd recklessness Sandor would never expect from him. "I have seen more name days than you and forgive me the observation but it seems to me that of late you have more reason to stay alive than I."

"What is on your mind?" the Hound emptied his flagon in a single pull, slamming it on the table so hard that the rickety board almost broke. "Explain!"

"The lady has eyes for you of late. When you are not watching. But I could always _see_ things and-"

"-Lady what? She's in love with the bloody mummery!" the Hound tried to deny as harshly as he could the sweetness of the night spent kissing Sansa, ashamed of his weakness for enjoying such a simple thing where he was a man grown and should have taken much more… or so said the familiar snarling monster slowly stirred awake by wine inside his brains… The Elder Brother would get killed by some abomination made of _his brother_. Sansa would come to her senses and see his scars in broad daylight and forget what she had asked of him… To be sure… That had to be the way of it.

"Besides," the Hound spoke with anger, "if you can see things, how is it that you don't see that your _friend_ means to kill you. He already meant to in the sept, and now he has found a nice lawful way to get rid of you."

"Brother," the Elder Brother's dark eyes pierced those of the Hound, pleading, conflicted and on the verge of tears, searching for approval or a form of friendship at the very least. They betrayed a tremendous doubt in everyone and everything that Sandor Clegane had never seen before in a man who had saved his life.

"Can't you understand?" the Elder Brother supplicated. "It is as if _I_ have to do this. As if this was the reason why the gods have sent me to the capital that has now been revealed..."

The Hound stood abruptly on his two strong feet. He needed _much_ more wine and of the better quality than the piss they were drinking if he was to swallow that kind of horseshit.

"Brother? What's wrong?" the Elder Brother asked of him in apprehension.

"Suit yourself," the younger man barked. "There is no such thing as the reason why gods have sent us to do anything. It is only you who wants to do it. And if you want to fight whatever they had made out of my brother, please, by all means, do it. Die as you wish! As will I."

And with those words he stormed out, steaming, leaving the Elder Brother to await his destiny all alone.

**Jaime**

They were lucky that Cersei dressed lavishly even when she visited the dungeons so they heard the rustle of her silks just on time to hide Brienne under the floor of the cell. Jaime tried to pull an indifferent face and avoided the look of her green eyes mirroring his own, afraid she would read his treason in them, written in golden capital letters.

"Sweet brother," she said immediately, breathless from her walk down the many winding stairs, "what do you know of this Elder Brother of the Quiet Isle?"

"Why now, sweet sister? The man is as simple as he is blessedly devoted to the Faith. Besides, he is not your type…"

The slap found his cheek, probably not half as strong as the one Brienne gave to Ser Hyle when he had tried to kiss her, but it hurt nonetheless.

"Don't be an idiot, Jaime. The Holy Sparrow, who is to my disgrace a much more dangerous enemy than I initially believed him to be, named him the Faith's champion. This monk must have some weapon or ability that we don't know of."

Jaime had to deny this, remembering the holy man who unceremoniously stomped out the fire destined to burn him and Brienne. "Cersei, he is older than us and he is no warrior. Just a peace loving monk who helps the innocent and the poor. A kind of man who would get himself killed for his neighbour if he believed him to be just. I don't see how he could possibly prevail over Ser Robert Strong I had the honour to meet in the throne room."

"Still…" Cersei paced around him, fighting her nervousness, and Jaime had to position himself in the middle to avoid that she stumbles into the hidden hole in the ground. As a consequence, he stood so odd that his knees hurt. He knew that he would not be able to maintain the posture for long.

"The Faith demanded a joust… Why would they do that if they weren't hiding something?" Cersei wanted to know.

"Perhaps you should ask His Holiness," Jaime suggested. "But if you ask me, this man can win only if the Seven miraculously give strength to his arm. And I stopped believing in such nonsense long time ago."

"Qyburn tells me no one can win over my champion. Only a person possessing a magic of old, or of the dragons who are all dead, could stand a chance. And there is no such person alive in Westeros."

Jaime unwillingly touched a black pendant under the coarse prisoner tunic on his neck, and instantly saw a pair of smooth long arms of a woman nervously clinging to a hiltless dagger in the impending darkness, probably hearing every word he and Cersei said. _Wait, we have borrowed these from this Elder Brother. Magic!_ he thought and he rejected it. _No. It can't be. That man is genuinely not rotten, just like Ned Stark had a mishap to be._

"Daenerys…" Jaime said instead, to stop the thoughts he could not share with his sister, spreading his arms like a blind bat to move both Cersei and himself away from the hole and toward the door. "-is not here!" she shot back. "Yet," Jaime stated with finality. "Cersei, you have to listen to me, please. We have to leave King's Landing. The sooner, the better."

"Father was right," his sister screamed, "you are a fool! And here I thought I might be able to count on you to do something for me."

"I have done too many things for you, sweet sister, and I will do many more," he told her, calm as a dungeon wall. "But I will not let you get yourself or Tommen killed."

"Oh no? And what will you do if their holy champion prevails? Wail in the dark? You're forgetting your place. I am the Queen Regent now!" she despised him and she would let it show. "I brought you something to ponder about your choices if your eyes are still good enough to see in the candlelight. Or maybe you lost your sight too when you lost your hand. Here!"

She left him a single candle burning, and than she hauled in a large heavy book she must have first left in front of the door of the cell.

"You don't deserve my mercy, or my love," she roared. "But you have it all the same. Best pray that Qyburn is right. Or I am sure that the Tyrells will arrange that an accident happens to you down here. Meanwhile, here's the damn thing you grew to love more than you have ever loved me."

She slammed him harsh in his chest with the hard covered book of more than a thousand pages, and hurried back up faster than when she came, panting. Jaime was left with the White Book of the Kingsguard, safely anchored between his strong arms.

He was certain that she would have hit him in the head, if only she equalled him in height.

For once, Jaime was glad that his twin sister and he were not exactly the same.

**Sansa**

The Elder Brother wandered to the fisherman's house all alone early in the afternoon, as a man who didn't know where he was going, his cowl wet with what may have been tears.

When Sansa asked if he had seen the Hound, he shrugged and climbed the city wall, dragging a saddlebag over his right shoulder. He scaled the masonry barefoot as if he were a great lizard and not a holy man, using every hollow in brick, mud and stone. On the top, he opened the bag and took out a broken lance, placing it carefully over his knees.

He stayed seated on the top, with only the broken weapon for company. In the distance, there was the sea, the glimmers of gold and blue bathing in the daylight.

When Sansa called to him, he refused to speak. She was reminded of Bran exploring the walls of Winterfell, and her heart ached. The thought of seeing the older man falling, broken like a heirloom of other times, lay heavy on her mind, so she begged him to come down. She even sang him softly a hymn to the Father and to the Smith. But the gods were deaf, and their servant lost to them, high up between the sea and the skies.

It did not help that the axe armoured sparrows and more refined Warrior's Sons with holy crystals in their swords followed after him from wherever he came from. More kept coming and going in small groups, to kneel under the wall and adore the holy champion of the faith, in confused whispers of prayers, awe and admiration.

"He will show to the world the true face of the queen," they said. "She hated the poor and let them starve. And now her hour has come."

When the evening came, Mance Rayder had had enough of hiding his uncouth face inside the house to avoid that some knight of the Faith who had been in Harrenhal recognises it and brings them trouble.

"Sansa," he said quietly from the inside. "Nymeria..." And Jon's sister immediately understood his counsel, fed up with the procession of the devote as a proper lady should never be.

"She is a sweet dog," she told the kneeling sparrows and the standing Warrior's Sons, five of them at that moment, when Nymeria answered her silent summon to stroll out of the house. The direwolf approached the men, a snarling menace ready to jump at the slightest provocation. "She guards this good house in the evening, my lords, the streets are full of non-trustworthy folk."

Nymeria jumped lazily at the first sparrow and tore off a piece of his patched breeches, grazing his dirty skin with her sharp teeth. "To me!" Sansa called her. "Good dog!" And then she spoke to the men who finally had the good sense to at least stand up. "My lords, perhaps you could continue your prayers somewhere else and leave us honest folk and the champion too, to have some rest. If not, how will his hand be strong as you wish for it to be, to defend your cause?"

"Mance," she said backwards to no one in particular when they all left. "Sandor..." And just like she took his meaning without many words, he willingly accepted hers, disappearing into the night with the rest of their company. Sansa was left with the Elder Brother, perched high up on the wall with the ruined lance, and the fisherman's family peering from their windows upstairs, in clear mistrust of their many tenants and their uninvited guests. Even Nymeria had to leave her to find some nourishment while the city remained plunged in the darkness.

They could not find him the entire night.

Gendry and Ser Daven led one rescue party but they returned empty-handed and fell into restless sleep.

Sansa needed only a gash over her throat to look worse than her not so dead mother in the early hours of the morning when Mance Rayder and Lord Blackwood finally dragged Sandor Clegane back to the house, dead drunk and heavy like a corpse.

The wildling and the riverlord had to use a cart the butchers would pull, with the carcasses of slaughtered pigs and aurochs always slightly hanging on the ground. Sandor's long legs swept the dust off the streets as they went, obscenely regular in his sullied breeches. His monk cloak was gone, lost only the Seven knew where. Only his own black clothing remained, covered in gore and dirt.

The ravens persecuting Lord Blackwood had wisely chosen to nest on the wall and forsake him, for the time being, at least. During the day they chirped at the praying sparrows as the messengers of doom, and their croaking always welcomed the company back to their temporary home.

"Sansa, here you have him," Mance said, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Try to get him conscious. Tytos and I will now bring the other one down from the wall, even if we have to set it apart, stone by stone."

"It would be for the best if we first poured a bucket of water over the Hound's head," Lord Blackwood said, "or he will oversleep the trial as a dog that he is."

"Blackwood, leave that choice to the lady. We have more work to do. Have you ever scaled a wall of the castle in a siege?" Mance asked and Blackwood followed him to the outside as if he was not a lord of the riverlands but a green man under the command of the King-beyond-the-Wall.

Sansa realised that no matter what happened, Mance never lost hope, never sat idle, and always tried to do something in all circumstances. _No wonder he was able to survive everything he did,_ she thought, a _nd it was not a small thing._ Even his cloak made of human skin seemed less repulsive to Sansa in the gratitude of a single moment when the wildling let the Hound's body drop on the longest of all pallets they had, right under her two feet. She was exhausted from standing and waiting for the men to return.

The advice on water was also sound and Sansa found herself holding a full bucket of it, still vaguely smelling on fish. _One, two, three…_ She closed her eyes and did it as fast as she could.

"Seven hells," a weak rasp came out of the Hound's mouth when the cold water hit him, and then he shook his head and hair like a proper dog in a bit more vigorous way. Nymeria growled at him weakly from the corner she occupied, recently returned from her night prowling of the streets, to digest whatever sustenance she took. Thinking of what Nymeria might be eating regularly made Sansa sick, and she preferred not to consider the matter.

"I am sorry," Sansa stuttered. Seeing her above him kept the Hound's grey eyes open, bloodshot and angry, the eyes of a killer she had not seen in a long while. "I had to wake you," she said. "You have to get well and help the Elder Brother. They say it will be a joust. You won the Hand's Tourney, you should be able to. We have only two days left to prepare."

"Seven hells, girl…" he said with revulsion. "Let me die piss drunk as I should have done after the Blackwater. Admit it, don't pretend otherwise, I am making you sick. And your chirping disgusts me. Always did."

"But you love me, you said so in your fever in Pennytree-" Sansa said without thinking and was met with a mean laugh from below. "Love you? What I would love to do to you, _my lady,_ is to bury my cock between your thighs and slam it in you until you screamed. Harder than you ever did for the Imp, or anyone else. Is this the kind of love you dream oft? Go back to your stupid songs and leave me be..." he finished his hateful statement and closed his eyes, determined to deny her being there.

Sansa wanted to scream at his awful words but she found that the image they conveyed was too powerful to ignore. Her back tingled in awkward sensation and her legs seemed to have lost solidity, bending like grass, softer than two fragile cinnamon sticks collapsing under the weight of the desert they were designed to spice on the royal table.

That was what men did, she knew. To women, even to other men in some cases. It was what other men wanted from her, too. Tyrion, Marilion, Petyr, servants and stable boys in the Vale... But the thought of the Hound doing that made her head turn with treacherous thoughts of spreading her legs for him willingly, and brace herself for the pain, as a wife should do for her husband. If only he would kiss her first and take her in his arms as he did before his anger returned.

Instead of screaming, she chose to tell him the truth as she saw it. "That seems to be what most men want from me, so why should it appall me if you want the same?"

She missed the incredulous opening of his mouth when she begged him with all her heart: "Please, help the Elder Brother prepare for the trial by combat. Will you not? You saved him before."

"It is in vain," he muttered, somewhat calmer. "He is doomed to failure."

"You don't know that! Please!"

"You asked me to do this often," he pulled her down to lie next to him, his face painfully close to hers, and all she could do was hold her breath and fight the sickening smell of acid wine he exhaled. She went stiff and the tingling in her spine was replaced by the all consuming fear that for once he might make good on his terrible promises to her.

"See," he rasped with difficulty and without malice, "the little bird has already changed her mind."

With those words he turned his face away from her and passed out.


	24. The Armour and the Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where there is hope

**Sansa**

When Sansa woke in the morning, Sandor Clegane was sitting and brooding at her feet.

She remembered falling asleep in an iron grip, unable to disentangle herself from his arms harder than stone used to build the high walls of Winterfell, in the midst of unsavoury intoxicating odours. The Hound was very different in the morning, detached, even dangerous in his own mute way. An armoured guard of expressionless terrible face she had learned to know first, towering over Joffrey.

The smell of wine was gone, and two empty buckets used for carrying water arranged neatly next to an empty hearth. His hair was tied backwards with a black string, revealing the ruin of his face in its entirety, completely contrary to his unconscious habit of combing it, in a vain attempt at vanity and hiding, all over the uneven landscape of his scars. She noticed for the first time that his bad ear was even worse than when she first started to fear him in King's Landing.

 _What has happened to you when you were away from me,_ she thought. _You wouldn't tell me if I asked it of you, would you now? Unless drunk..._

Sansa shivered and she didn't want him to get drunk again even if that condition made him more talkative, towards her, at least.

He must have covered her in the night, for a thin blanket of the fisherman's family lay over her shoulders, tender as the spider web, supple as the simple gowns she used to wear in her childhood under heavy woollen cloaks, when she would waddle with her siblings through the summer snow.

He must have gone to the well and brought the water, there was none left after she showered him last night. _He did a woman's job,_ she thought, uncertain if that meant anything at all.

"They are still at it," he told her, and his words sounded strangely like an apology. "The Elder Brother will not come off the wall. I thought of climbing after him, but I am afraid that parts of it would not hold my weight on the spot where he is sitting. The only thing I would be certain to achieve is to have us both break our necks."

A ray of light penetrated the room under the closed door, and Sansa rejoiced at the morning, her heart glad for the departure of the night.

Sitting up warily after uneasy sleep, she gestured to Nymeria who came to her immediately, wiggling her large tail around the hem of her gown. Straightening the heavy folds, she ventured out in front of the house, aware in a corner of an eye that a looming presence followed her at a _respectable_ distance, deepening the gladness in her heart.

"No, Mance," Lord Blackwood said, the dark circles under his eyes much blacker than usual. "We can't break down the wall short of killing him, and that is not our intention."

Gendry leaned on his warhammer and gazed up the wall, as if he were considering bringing it down. Two sparrows already knelt in front of it, with their hands wide open in prayer, not minding the raven nesting on the head of one of them, screeching towards the sun as a rooster would crow to a new day. Nymeria leapt to Gendry and lay down at his feet, sweeter than any real dog could ever be.

"I will never find another kneeler with enough honour to read the part of Eddard Stark. And the very last scene of my mummery will be hollow and meaningless without his presence," Mance said with deep regret. "Elder Brother!" he called out again. "Look, Lady Sansa and the Hound are also up and about. For the sake of your gods, let us help you! There is no such foe that cannot be bested! You threw a dagger at a white walker and you did not perish! By the old gods, you have to survive this Robert Strong!"

But the man above did not move, appearing almost lifeless on the place where he had spent the night, like another stone mounted on the wall, an irregular piece of masonry touching the clear blue sky.

"Look," Sansa called for their attention, "the septas are coming too."

Two grey clad, black looking women, climbed up the street leading to the fishermen's house like hard working ants, their hair completely hidden by the impeccable tall headdresses, leaving visible only two oval shaped faces. One dark, and one somewhat paler with unnaturally dark eyes, not old yet, but somehow wiser than the number of her name days. The darker skinned of the two said, eyeing warily the Hound. "We have come to see the champion of the Faith."

The other one looked at Mance with keen eyes and asked. "They say that you are a northern bard who sings of times long gone, and makes up a mummers' show about a dragon prince and a wolf girl, as one who had known them when they lived. What say you?"

"News fly fast and people talk too much," Mance said with modesty. "My songs are my own."

"Then show us a part so that we can make our own judgement," said the darker, skinny septa turning her attention to Mance, her eyes flushing at him a little too vividly in Sansa's opinion. The way Lady Margaery would look at the Redwyne twins and some other young knights at Joffrey's court before she became queen.

"Might be it calls the champion down among us," said the dark-eyed woman who spoke to Mance first, following the wings of the raven, which lifted flight from the sparrow's head and towards the black immobile shape of a man. The bird croaked only once, shrilly, to the mighty sun, born from the grey mist far away among the waves.

"Might be my players don't want to read on a whim," said the King-beyond-the-Wall.

"Give us a bloody parchment and you shall see," the Hound rasped sternly, stunning Sansa with his eagerness to please, in his own forward way. She found herself blushing under her hair at the sound of his voice, hopeful that the pink of her surprise did not crawl too high up on her heart-shaped face. There were too many people watching, and her thoughts were dwelling in a most improper realm whenever she remembered the horrible things he had told her last. The Hound wanted her as other men did, but the revelation did not sicken her as it should have. His drunken admission rolled something out of his soul and loaded it deep into hers, something new and heavier than steel, weighing a thousand times more than the iron weights the merchants in King's Landing used for their trade.

Sansa forced herself to look at the septas and to stop thinking.

"You are lucky that your part today does not call for talking," Mance told the Hound. "Only for a body presence."

The pale septa smiled at the men, her laugh ringing clearly like small bells on a mane of a horse braided for a fair. She clapped her hands, unceremoniously tossing her boots on the ground, feeling the wall for a place to climb, in a very non septa-like manner. Sansa noticed that her boots had heels of the most unusual making for ladies. She had never seen such craft in King's Landing, and she could swear they were not from Westeros. Without them, the septa was not as tall as she looked when she was standing.

"Septa Lemore," her friend addressed her. "Is this clever?"

"The ways of the Seven are sometimes sinuous, as you know best, Septa Tyene," the older woman said flatly.

In several fast moves the older septa was on the wall, walking as a cat on all fours on its top, sure-footed and bent like a four-pawed creature. Sansa thought how Septa Lemore now seemed rather short even for a woman, yet awkwardly gracious in her large robes, streaming behind her in the morning breeze.

 _Like in a real song,_ Sansa concluded, admiring the septa's bravery.

Lemore sat next to the bald monk whose head was barren under the sky, towering more than a head above her headdress, so that she barely reached his shoulder. Her bare feet started dangling in the air, next to a pair of long, equally unclothed holy legs of the champion of the Faith.

"I was told you wanted to help me yesterday, Elder Brother," she told him and her voice had the effect nothing else did since the heralds merrily announced the man's doom.

The monk lowered his gaze and looked at something other than the sky for the first time since he went up the wall.

"Septa… Lemore," he said politely, uncertain and yet courteous as if they had not been seated twenty feet above the street and more than fifty above the jagged rocks on the outer side of the wall. "It is most kind of you to have come all the way here."

"Elder Brother," she replied without hesitation. "I am only repaying your kindness. Look, the song of your friend will continue below, don't you want to hear how it ends?"

"I wanted to hear it very much before, but somehow it slipped off my mind," he said. "Will you help me to listen again?"

He stretched a hand to Lemore who grasped it eagerly and helped a much taller man to turn his back to the sun, and look instead at the opening in front of the fisherman's house.

Gendry and Nymeria have proudly cleared out the sparrows and they stood guard some thirty feet away in the direction of the city, growling or staring menacingly at anyone with the intention to pass. And everyone was becoming a significant lot of them as the hours of the morning slowly dwindled.

A man in full dark armour, although a closer look would reveal it was rather patched, with a helm completely covering his face, stood alone in the middle of the clearing. Sansa was laid in front of him, tied firmly to the pallet she had slept on, wearing the white weirwood mask. She fancied herself an offering the red priestess would make to the Lord of Light, the nefarious red woman from the Free Cities Mance had told her stories about, burning innocents, and reading wrong destinies in her flames.

Sansa found it easy to condemn the knight above her in empty words, but it was of another one she thought: "How could you? I have given you my trust and you repay me by making me your captive!"

The armoured man did not speak, he only lifted her skirts with the cold precision of a maester, so that they revealed ankles and knees, indifferent to the pleas of his victim.

"Lyanna Stark has no fear of men," the victim still spoke. "You can take my honour if you so wish and I will find a way to my death willingly, not regretting the young years of my life. Death can be found in many places, my prince. But before I go, I have to concede you one victory," Sansa's voice faltered as Mance instructed her it should. "Know that I have started to think highly of you, and your betrayal has crushed my heart. I hope that my father, my brothers, or Lord Robert Baratheon will find strength to punish you for what you intend to do."

Sansa raised her hands high above her head, tied together with a hempen rope, and struggled to look at the armoured man. And to see what was behind the slits of his helm, again as she was told to do.

She continued speaking softly towards the closed helm, with defiance gone, and only sorrow left in her voice.

"Why?" she pleaded. "Why not show me your true face if we both know how it looks. The rubies on your armour speak clearly of who you are. Rhaegar… if I may call you so now that your men have told me I am but one of the many mistresses you took. Rhaegar… Why take me? Why now if you have spared me such destiny before? I do not understand."

"Your Grace," Mance peered from the inside of the house and spoke with haste and obedience, as a loyal squire would to the knight he served. "Riders are after us. Take the girl on your horse and let us run. It could be her brothers, or her betrothed."

But still as he spoke another armoured knight whose face was hidden by a non-conspicuous helm pushed Mance roughly aside, and then ran down the one who lifted Sansa's skirts with a practised swing of a broom, playing the role of a long tourney lance.

Sansa's heart swooned for she would have recognised that man in any disguise he wore, and feigning that she didn't know him as Mance explained she should do, proved demanding beyond count.

The mute knight collapsed, exaggerating his fall, clumsily holding the broom-lance in place between his arm and his body, dying too prominently for his passing to leave a lasting impression.

Septa Lemore giggled on the wall, and took one half of the lance that the Elder Brother was holding, aiming at nothing in particular in the blue air of the morning. "Doesn't look that difficult, does it?" she said.

"It used to be easy," he replied, "but killing is the greatest sin there is against the Seven. I abandoned the ways of the soldier. It is wrong."

"The one down there is still wriggling, look," she pointed out.

"But I won't be, two days hence. Or the queen's champion if the gods so wish. It still remains wrong."

Down below the victorious knight threw Sansa over his shoulder and disappeared back into the house, while the one who supposedly died crawled away like a toddler towards Gendry and Nymeria, a blond curl crawling out shyly from under the helm, revealing Ser Daven Lannister to a knowing pair of eyes.

"More, I beg you," cried Septa Lemore. "The lady has to unmask the saviour of her honour."

But instead of Sansa, or her knight, Mance Rayder came out in person holding his lute, and began singing, under the voice, of a distant past, and two people long gone.

" _Many a mile, and many a perilous way,_

_Measure the distance between the Neck_

_And the deserts of Dorne._

_The mystery knight took the lady away,_

_And first she struggled and then she spoke._

_x_

_She told him her father would pay him in gold,_

_She told him her betrothed would kill him,_

_She asked him to let her go!_

_But the knight in his armour remained_

_Mute as the night_

_Kind as the day_

_And when in the evening they finally slept,_

_His sword was laid between them._

_xxx_

_The evil prince sent his men_

_To bring back the knight and the lady_

_For weeks they rode and hid in the bogs,_

_With sheep, with peasants, among the thorns,_

_And she wanted to thank him._

_x_

_She asked him who he was,_

_And why the prince defy he would_

_For a lady he never knew?_

_But the knight in his armour remained_

_Mute as the night_

_Kind as the day_

_And when in the evening they finally slept,_

_His sword was laid between them._

_xxx_

_Ambushed they were, near the walls of King's Landing._

_Five cloaks of gold made the knight bleed,_

_Still the wolf in the lady would never yield!_

_She made the knight's lance swirl and twirl,_

_Running down each of the two foes still standing._

_x_

_To a village she had him brought_

_A help, at last, to unclasp his helm!_

_But it was all for naught,_

_For the knight in his armour remained_

_Mute as the night_

_Kind as the day_

_And when in the evening they finally slept,_

_His sword was laid between them._

_xxx_

_A girl in the village died that night, of sickness no one could heal,_

_The lady buried her then, where the gold cloaks now lay so still._

_Her face was pale, her hair was ashen,_

_And the evil prince would never see_

_That her eyes had been blue as the sky,_

_Not grey as they should have been._

_x_

_She never told the knight what she did,_

_Enchanted, she followed his lead,_

_Wondering where he would take her._

_The knight who always in his armour remained_

_Mute as the night_

_Kind as the day_

_And when in the evening they finally slept,_

_His sword was laid between them._

_xxx_

_The lady carried a token, a dagger of black stone,_

_It came from the North,_

_A gift from the crow on the Wall._

_Sharper than steel, the crow had told her,_

_But she never tried it at all._

_x_

_She measured the knight when he slept,_

_She recalled the banners that after them came,_

_And those of the evil prince who took her._

_While her true knight in his armour remained_

_Mute as the night_

_Kind as the day_

_And when in the evening they finally slept,_

_His sword was laid between them._

_xxx_

_The knight wrote words with a stick in the sand_

_For they had ridden that far south_

_To return her home he vowed,_

_Even to Robert Baratheon._

_When she would no longer have to fear the royal hands._

_x_

_The lady released him from his vows,_

_The black stone opened the way._

_And when he slept, she cut through his helm,_

_And spilled a stream of silver hair_

_As no other man could have_

_But the Prince of Dragonstone._

_x_

_Rhaegar who never took her!_

_Rhaegar who didn't touch her for months!_

_Rhaegar who came to save her!_

_And as the knight in his armour he remained_

_Mute as the night_

_Kind as the day_

_And when in the evening they finally slept,_

_She took the sword from between them._

_xx_

"Which sword?" a Warrior's Son cried from a circle of unwanted spectators behind Nymeria when the song ended, and met the force of Gendry's hammer from very close by, before anyone could answer him.

Mance bowed to the Elder Brother and the septa on the wall. Then he took to cursing the onlookers heartily, choosing his words with the same care as when he sang, whether they were proper or not.

"If your swords are rusty, holy people, please, do leave here and visit some of the places of great esteem in this city, held by Lord Littlefinger. You will find food for swords of all sizes there, or so I heard. This song happens to be of a different kind."

"Have you paid a visit to one of those unholy houses of ill repute?" asked Septa Tyene when the unwanted public started dissipating.

"I sang a rhyme or two here and there," Mance said without looking at the woman. "Dornishman's wife and that. A bard has to know well the town where he will one day sing his life's work."

At that, the Hound came out of the house, armourless and unmasked, and rasped from the bottom of his burnt throat, looking up with grim determination: "Brother! Would you come down now, so that I can teach you how to send my dead brother to seven hells properly this time? I am offering!"

The Elder Brother grinned sheepishly and started a descent without giving a second look to Septa Lemore who still held a piece of his lance.

"You forgot something," she told him when she came down herself.

"Boy, that is, Gendry," the Hound said making a great effort at courtesy. "You have skilled hands. Can you find a place to work and make this lance whole by tomorrow? Even if it's not entirely the smith's work. It is the lance the Elder Brother used in the battle of Trident so there is a chance that it fits him better than any other we could find now in haste."

Gendry nodded and turned to leave, almost colliding with the large shape of the Lady Brienne of Tarth who was the last person standing in the show's audience when all the others left.

"My lady," he said.

"I stayed with Pod and Ser Hyle last night. I came to return the Elder Brother's possessions as soon as I heard about the summons," she said, holding out the hiltless dagger and the black pendant. "I would also like to gift the Elder Brother with my own shield, such as it may be," she added and put forward a painted rounded shield, where the path of a falling star had been bathed in dragonfire in the woods of Harrenhal.

"Mance, what say you?" the Hound called the singer, glancing at the possessions returned. "If the smith could put both of these at the end of the spear..."

"...they would kill a white walker..."

"... maybe they could kill an ordinary monster as well," Sandor Clegane finished his thought. "Than you can write a proper buggering song about it and let the Lady Sansa sing it accompanied with the harp. She has more beautiful voice than you. And I dare say she plays equally well."

A sound of bucket dropping on the floor was heard on the inside, from one very astonished lady, not at all used to simple praise from the Hound's mouth. Sansa marvelled that he even knew she could play the high harp.

"I cannot take this shield, my lady," the Elder Brother said, but the tall blond woman knelt on the smooth white stones of the street in front of him.

"You have saved my life in that fire pit, as surely as my mother had given it to me," she said. "I cannot say more about my shield for the oaths I have to keep, but I beg you, take it. It has been touched by one single thing that could help you against Ser Robert Strong, by the words of his own maker."

"She's lying," said the Hound in a cruel voice, "at least about where she slept. I may have seen this Hyle Hunt and the Imp's squire in one of the winesinks I visited last night, and her ladyship was most definitely not there."

"I don't drink in common room with men, I retired to bed _early,_ my lord," Brienne replied after a moment of hesitation, and then she implored the Elder Brother. "Please. You have met me at the Quiet Isle and you trusted me enough not to let me die at the hands of the Lady Stoneheart. You need a shield. And this one may bring the help you so desperately need."

"Well, my friends, if I may call all of you so," said the Elder Brother looking around with a warm smile on his lips. "I was lost, but it seems that you have found me again. I will take all things offered, for the Seven bless and guide the giving hand, and pray for such outcome as will please the gods."

"Training first, prayers later, if it please you," said the Hound, gesturing to the Elder Brother to follow him.

"One more thing, brother," Septa Lemore said. "The trial will not take place on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor, but in front of the city gates in the direction of the kingsroad."

"If I didn't know better, I would say that this lord priest of yours who seems to think so highly of the Elder Brother's head is waiting for a Targaryen pretender, and using the trial by combat to have Queen Cersei and King Tommen delivered as a welcoming gift," Mance had to say to two visibly embarrassed septas.

"It seems that we have all travelled far too long with Lord Baelish," the Elder Brother had to disagree, "to even consider such base treachery from His Holiness..."

"It is probably just as you said, wildling," the Hound added and finished Mance's thought again. "And then preferably after Ser Robert Strong kills the Elder Brother first."

"Not going to happen," Gendry said firmly, clutching together the pieces of a broken lance, the dagger and the black stone.

"I can inlay the breastplate of the Mad King with the river stones from the ghost of the High Heart. For luck," said the Lady Sansa through the open window.

"He needs more than luck, my lady, to see this through," the Hound said coldly, "but indeed filling the holes where Aerys' rubies used to be could make the breastplate less vulnerable to Gregor's unearthly blows."

"Remember, all of you," Mance counselled. "When your laws betray us, we will do it the wilding way."

"What is the wildling way?" Septa Tyene was curious.

"You steal your women and you cut down your enemies. There is no middle ground."

"I could get used to wildlings," the Hound laughed hoarsely, pulling the Elder Brother away from the mummers' company and the two septas.

**Mance**

When they left, Mance ignored as hard as he could Septa Tyene's unmistakable look of offering him freely what he would have to pay for in some places. He murmured behind Sandor Clegane's back in placid amusement: "Our ways would only give you trouble, my giant friend. The woman you want has already stolen you before you even dared in earnest to do the same."

Mance most certainly did not want to steel any woman any time soon. He could not stand to open his being to a woman and lose her again. Once had been quite enough. In his mind, the earth had not yet cooled down on Dalla's funeral pyre remains, covered with soft snow so far from King's Landing that the distance hurt. And the eyes of the King-beyond-the-Wall still watered every time he remembered that she would have still been alive if she didn't choose to carry his child. _I could not protect you, my love._ One more victim fallen on the unglorified battlefield of womanhood. _Why do you all have to be mothers?_ Mance thought and wished his errand was over so that he could go freely and look for his son. _In the Citadel, that is where the fat crow went._

Septa Tyene showed no intention to leave, so Mance had no choice but to hang his lute on his belt, unlace his bear leather boots and climb carefully up on the wall. To dream of new verses and of ways of killing a monster of the south, should the Elder Brother fail.

"You have never met Ser Arthur Dayne, have you?" Septa Lemore asked from below, her eyes keener than the eyes of an eagle circling high above the peaks of the Frostfangs.

"No," he felt obliged to reply. "But I did see the wolf girl as a young crow on the Wall. She came up with her father and brothers. I never forgot her."

"May the gods watch over you, Mance Rayder," Septa Lemore said and yanked her brazen friend to leave. "Until we see each other again."

**Jaime**

Brienne left Jaime only in the morning.

Or in what passed for morning in the eternal darkness of the black cells where the candle left by Cersei died well before they were done and able to sleep in the presence of each other.

They didn't do much that night. Or not much by the standards of soldiers used to a fast tumble and the easy joy of completion.

Jaime could not remember when was the last time, or if there ever was a time, when he was allowed to wake up with the woman he wanted in his arms. She had caressed him and run her dry fingers skilled in arms all over his body in the dark, curious to discover how he was. Jaime only missed the light to start purring from satisfaction, where the unnatural warmth was so kindly provided by the omnipresent distant pulsing of Cersei's wildfire. When he was concerned, the Lannister words could have changed to announce "Hear me purr!" from that day on and for all days to come. He sincerely hoped that his father turned restlessly in his grave if by some miracle the gods would let him hear Jaime's foolish thoughts.

He was allowed to touch her in return, only to prove true his fervent belief that her freckled harsh-looking skin was indeed softer than silk or Myrish lace. There was so much of her all around him that he wished he had been born a dwarf, instead of Tyrion. Then he could get even more lost in the maze of her firm limbs, anchored safely against her flat chest. Purring aside, Jaime would never admit such thoughts aloud to anyone alive.

A weakness.

A softness unmeasurable that could be used against him with power more destructive than fire or hard steel.

Brienne left him a maid, and Jaime found that for some things, at least, quite unexpectedly, he could very well use his left hand. The memory of which made him grin broader than the fool caught in the middle of the king's favourite jest.

 _I betrayed Cersei,_ he thought with equal part mirth and chagrin. _Another broken vow..._

Jaime vowed never to swear another vow in his life.

Abandoned in the darkness, he found that he could, and perhaps should, think clearly again. He carefully lifted the floor where they didn't sleep. Afraid of falling through it at night, they had stayed very close to the dungeon wall in the most gentle embrace.

The corridor below was narrow with three openings at the end, warm and stinky. He tried the least smelly one, only to hit the wall hot like burning embers. The other, longer corridor, also led to a heated wall, on which one could climb, using holes that could serve as stairs. But the height and the direction was uncertain, and Jaime suspected his left hand and both feet would be severely burnt before he would ever reach the top. The scaling of that wall would most likely lead to falling back down in agony, and to long time suffering of injuries in the darkness, without ointments or the milk of the poppy to relieve the pain.

The last corridor stank worse than the Great Sept of Baelor when he stood vigil next to the decomposing body of his Lord Father. With heavy heart, he followed down a moderate descent, half expecting to see a pile of fresh corpses staring at him with glassy eyes at the end of the way.

The room he found was pristine and empty, except for a neatly ordered table, containing metallic and glass instruments of all kinds. A long rectangular working surface was covered by a dark grey cloth falling over its sides and down to the straw covered floor. Hooks, forks, measuring instruments, sewing needles, bottles, crystal vials, tongs, pliers and pincers of all sorts and sizes. For some tools, he had seen the Grand Maester Pycelle use them in his work, and some knives were broader than those used to cut open a boar in the royal kitchens.

In the middle of the table burned a single black candle.

Except that it was not made of wax, or tallow, and the flame was not a flame, but a black substance, the same one that the candle was made of. Crystal. Black glass. It coloured the surroundings in a stark purple glow, providing the darkness with an unworldly charm, a gloomy brightness, unnatural and ancient like the ruins of old Valyria were described in the boring books Jaime had to study as a boy.

He gave in to the urge to touch it and cursed himself for a lackwit who could have burned, but the material was quite cool, a dark magic at work if there was one existing in the world. Jaime tried to remember everything he knew about the order of the maesters and their life in the Citadel but nothing seemed to include miraculously burning black candles which were not candles at all.

Tyrion would know. But Tyrion was not there, and Jaime was left to fend for himself.

A set of steps echoed from outside, behind the locked door on one side of the room, and Jaime realized he could not go back in time not to be seen. So he sank under the table, quiet as a grave. The soil under it was malleable, sinking with too great an ease under his body weight. He squatted on it gingerly, breathing through his mouth to evade the smell, entirely not wanting to think about what all might be buried under his feet. And if the remains would be animal, or human, or both.

It was Qyburn and Cersei, he an image of calmness, and she, more upset than when she visited him last.

"See, Your Grace, there's nothing to worry about," Qyburn said. "The candle is still burning. As long as it is so, nothing will sever your champion from life."

"It is a joust, you idiot," she disagreed, "if he only but gets unhorsed, the High Septon may concede his defeat."

"A trial by combat should lead to the death of one of the opponents, as far as the laws of the realm are concerned," Qyburn said, "so you would be in your right to demand the trial to continue. But trust me when I tell you that our champion will not sit idle if by some miracle he should be unhorsed. He will be driven to the living blood of his opponent until it turns as dead as his own. I swear it by all the knowledge I have gathered over the years. All that has to be done is to make certain that our champion understands clearly who his enemy is, in no vague terms. His Holiness will undoubtedly already establish this designation when he announces the parties in the trial as is custom. And then Ser Robert Strong will show the persistence of the Starks in dealing with winter, and rain the wrath of the old kings in the north down to this unhappy brother of the Faith who should have stayed on the Quiet Isle where he belonged. I wouldn't like to be in his place."

"What if the wind blows out the candle?" Cersei asked and Jaime had to stop himself from laughing hard at her inability to see the obvious. That the flame was not the flame, and the candle not the candle. _He calls you Your Grace, sweet sister, and the sheer flattery makes you close your eyes to the truth._

"Your Grace," Qyburn said in confirmation of Jaime's thoughts. "This candle was lit by the black blood of a living dead. I achieved this only two days ago, in the afternoon, just before the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard graced us with his presence again. None of the members of my former order in the Citadel was able to make a glass candle burn in a hundred years. They claimed that only the return of the doom of old from across the sea could set the flameless candles alight. But I did it from sources entirely available in Westeros-"

"I am not interested in your explanations, Maester Qyburn," Cersei decided to end the conversation with a threat, and Jaime thought it well done. _The lioness has to let the servant know that she still has claws._ "If you are wrong and I am condemned, I will see to it that the blade of the King's Justice finds you first, much sooner than it will ever find me."

They left, and locked the door. Jaime crawled out from under the table more confused than ever, stiff and in a cold sweat. The sweetness of the unexpected embraces in his cell entirely washed out by the new terror.

He hoped that Brienne would visit him before the trial as they planned to relay the things he learned, for better or for worse. And to secure his timely escape should the Elder Brother prevail and Cersei be in real danger.

For good measure, he tried to move or otherwise disturb the ominous candle in its quiet fireless burning, pulling it and pushing it with various instruments at his disposal, careful to lay them back on the spot they occupied before he took them.

In vain.

The corpses rotted in peace beneath him. The entire Red Keep seemed like a great graveyard of human wisdom and kindness, and the cursed black candle remained burning. And Jaime could not help but wonder why Qyburn mentioned the damn Starks to give account of what the monster of obviously his creation was capable of.

Jaime crawled back to his cell, burdened by his discoveries, resigned to wait for whoever would visit him next.


	25. A Verse for Elia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where nothing goes exactly as planned

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gore. You have been warned.

**Sandor**

"You are not a gnat," Sandor Clegane concluded, somewhat surprised, and from his mouth the offensive words sounded like the greatest praise. He was returning with the Elder Brother from the old Tourney Grounds in the direction of the King's Gate, on the last evening before the trial. "I already suspected so when we played at this in Harrenhal, but now I have no doubt left. You must have been really good in your youth. I believe that you may have a chance against my brother."

They were both dusty and sweaty, holding long wooden poles instead of tourney lances, trotting on Stranger and Patience, whom they would stable in a some poor man's barn near the Red Keep. The animals, apart from Nymeria who never left their side, could not fit with the fisherfolk. There were too many people there as it was. The number of devote visitors increased daily, and since the Elder Brother's stunt with the wall, the faithful would all leave a pair of their own shoes under it, in sign of their support to the champion.

The Elder Brother grinned, dismounted, and sat carelessly in the ditch on the side of the road, glad it contained only mud, and not any other residues of the life in the city, whose smell extended well beyond the relative safety of its high walls. The monk tossed the helm he wore on the ground and scratched his head where a relentless grey stubble now persistently grew not only around his ears, but also over most of his once bald head.

"You are still too young to be completely grey-haired, brother," the Hound found that the words left his mouth without much thinking, a habit he had with only a few people living in the world. "We should find a way to shave it off for tomorrow if it bothers you under the helm. Any distraction can prove to be a dangerous thing."

"Oh, I tried," the monk said, "but every time I did it, it grew thicker and thicker, and even more so since we came to the capital. I used to take a herb for it but it no longer grows in autumn. Might be best to leave it as gods want it, grey is as good a colour as any."

"You will ride my horse," the Hound said next.

"Didn't you say Gregor knows it, as he knows you? And that my only chance in fighting him is to attack him differently then what he knows?"

"Even so. Stranger is much swifter. It is worthwhile the risk."

"Let's see tomorrow," the Elder Brother said. "I will try to unhorse him. If the gods are good, it will be enough to end the trial."

"I wouldn't count on it, brother," the Hound gave a feral laugh. "And neither should you, being on this world far longer than I have been."

"Sometimes I believe," the monk said uncertainly and his dark eyes coloured with unknown emotion, "that you and I should have been born brothers."

"That is so very sweet of you," the Hound retorted gruffly, "but we were born as we were. There's nothing to do about it."

The evening came down to the road, the ditch, the two men and their horses. The sunset flared red in the horizon. Red like fresh blood.

"Tell me," the monk dared asking, "how can you believe at all that I might best Gregor when you wanted it all your life, and yet you never did it yourself. From your stories, you never made a serious attempt at it when you became a man grown. Did you not try for the obedience you owed to your liege lords?"

"No," the Hound shook his head, and stated, calmly, a truth he would not admit to himself for very long. "I never tried because I knew I was going to lose. I hated him too much to go after him with the required precision. You don't hate him. What is worse, you don't hate anyone. That is why you may be able to do what has to be done."

"I'm amazed to hear this from an old soldier as you see yourself," the Elder Brother thought aloud. "Even I have always thought that the hatred of your enemy is what brings you victory in war."

"I killed a countless number of people for who I didn't feel a thing. And I could not kill the one I hated most of all," Sandor Clegane admitted. "Hatred blinds. Like fear."

"Like love," added the Elder Brother.

"I wouldn't know about that," the Hound chased the annoying thought away as Stranger did with flies under his regal black tail.

"Sometimes, brother," the Elder Brother insisted on a conversation, where the Hound would have preferred the silence, "I still dream about Princess Elia and her children. Long time ago, when I was some years younger than you are now, I fought under the dragon banners on the Trident. I wore a favour of my second wife from the Reach, but for some reason, after the defeat, the face of Elia, tortured in her death, would not leave my mind, as if I had had a part in it, where I did not. At the Quiet Isle, I thought myself mad for remembering this. After all, who were they to me? A royal family I have never even seen from close by."

"I was twelve when Gregor killed Elia," the Hound changed his mind and decided to reward him with a story of his own. There could be no harm in talking earnestly to a man who might die on the morrow. "I took part in the sack of King's Landing and I killed my first man. Gregor found me in the camp of the Lannister soldiers when he was done raping and squashing children. He was after my blood too, but I wouldn't let him have it. Not then, not ever. I fought back and the other soldiers helped me out until Lord Tywin himself ordered him to stop. Gregor shouted to me over the ranks that one day he will make me squeal more than Elia and her children did. I've also thought about them ever since. It felt for the longest time as if I was also responsible for their deaths, and of so many others, because I was not capable of killing my brother when I should. What I want to say, brother, you are far from being the only person who lamented Elia's death or who was shocked by Gregor's atrocity. By all known records, she was a most kind woman."

"Still, I wonder…" said the Elder Brother, lost in the thoughts of the past.

"Let's head back," the Hound suggested. "Time to give one final try to your armour and the lance Gendry made."

The two unarmoured men rode back like victorious knights returning home, without a second thought about what tomorrow would bring.

The shadows of the evening grew longer and dark purple in colour over the land. But the sun still sank carelessly into the sea, beneath the high city walls, red like blood.

**Brienne**

The lists for the trial by combat of the Queen Regent, Cersei, of the House Lannister and Baratheon, were made in front of the Dragon Gate, next to the kingsroad heading north. The high dais hosted King Tommen and Queen Margaery, whom the Faith had found innocent of all charges only the day before. The Queen's father, Lord Mace Tyrell, the Hand of the King, sat on his daughter's side, together with his mother, Lady Olenna Tyrell, known as the Queen of Thorns, who had recently returned from Highgarden to the capital.

The Queen Regent sat one step under her son, stern and proud in Baratheon colours, black and yellow. The long golden waves of her hair were falling free of all styles fashionable in the south, in sign of penitence the occasion required. Her perfect face betrayed no emotion, her demeanour was a mask of piety and peace.

The Lady Brienne of Tarth balanced her considerable weight from one leg to another, very nervously, standing among the people of King's Landing, mixed with the knights of minor houses, only twenty feet away from the king and the queens, unable to calm down. She wore a light armour and a short sword, the best she could find fast in King's Landing. She was not particularly proud of the way she acquired it, buying it from a hedge knight from the Stormlands in front of the Dragon Gate. He wouldn't have sold it before she threatened to beat him bloody if he didn't accept her more than generous offer, taking with him the last of her father's coin.

When she went early in the morning to feed Jaime as his gaoler, she had found the Red Keep closed off to everyone. "The prisoner does not need food today," the gold cloaks jeered at her, "the roses will see to all of his needs after the trial."

Brienne froze at the cruel statement and walked away, pulling a face of a dumb wench they expected to see with more difficulty than usual. Now at least she was armed. The rough-spun dress she still wore in the morning was packed in a small saddle bag she carried in case she would need it later. She prayed for the Elder Brother to win the trial and to the Warrior to fortify her hand and help her bring Cersei to safety in a moment of confusion before the High Septon would order her apprehension, or death. Tommen should be safe for awhile, for she couldn't believe that His Holiness sought to sell him out as Mance Rayder had said. It would be much more dishonour than people were usually capable of, or so she found.

Jaime could not save his sister, so she had to do it for him.

In repayment for his gentleness… _No, not in repayment,_ Brienne did not want to lie to herself. It seemed that, beyond her wildest expectations in the field, she had just become Jaime's… _lady love._ She remembered the response of his body under her hands, and of the sweetness of his fingers where no man's finger had ever been. And for much that it shamed her, she would not have it any other way. Even if he replaced her with Cersei later on again, when the times would become better, or a new spring would come. _He couldn't see so well in the dark, my dear,_ said the voice of Septa Roelle in the pit of her confused mind.

"Shut up!" she told her, earning a peculiar look from a fat retainer standing next to her, thoroughly amazed at the tall knight speaking in a female voice to himself.

She looked around and pretended she didn't say a thing.

Very near the royal dais, across from where Brienne was standing, there was a simple wooden pedestal on four high pillars, built for the High Septon overnight, surrounded by a line of Warrior's Sons and the pressing undulating sea of sparrows, septons, septas, monks from all lands and silent sisters with their long mourning dresses. The Faith Militant came in force to the trial while the nobility and the people of King's Landing gathered together on the opposite side of them, mingling with each other with no regard for rank and stature.

The High Septon had become very powerful, and he favoured the equality among the faithful, so the lords and ladies tried not to react with disdain at the ragged commoners standing next to them. It has become known that anyone who would not be pious enough, could be the next person accused of treachery and fornication by the Faith. And not everyone could afford a Kingsguard champion like Ser Robert Strong to defend their cause, or have stored plenty of crops for the winter as the Tyrells to buy one. An appearance of humility became fashionable, and even the Queen Margaery, who would always be King Renly Baratheon's widow in Brienne's eyes, wore a simple grey robe very much closed on the chest, in contrast to her previous dresses revealing more than was proper of her lady's charms.

Brienne thought of how ridiculous she would look in one of Margaery's gowns open from the neck almost to the belly button with her two small breasts. Gowns or not, and still a maid, she had learned beyond any doubt that as ridiculous as it might have seemed to her only three days ago, her body, such as it was, could please a man.

And not just any man, one of the best men she had ever known, no matter what he sometimes thought of himself.

The Lady of Tarth had to distract herself from her inappropriate thoughts, and there was nothing better for it then to further study the situation in the field. An entirely necessary endeavour to the fulfilment of her new self-sworn oath to save Cersei for Jaime. She noted how only the Lady Olenna did not care for the newly found modesty in ladies' fashion, ostentatiously wearing a dark pink gown, somewhat too colourful for her venerable age. But her gaze was so sharp that even the High Septon did not dare observe a thing when she bowed with the rest of the royal family to greet him before stepping up to her own place. The highborn ladies whispered that she had paid a handsome sum in gold to the High Septon for the Queen Margaery's innocence. If one was to believe the rumours, in the love of gold at least, the new High Septon was just the same as his predecessors, except that he didn't let the riches of the Faith show, but rather kept them under key in the deep wine cellars near the Great Sept of Baelor. In the very first days when he took over the lamp of the Faith, His Holiness had had all the wine poured out, and spilled down the dirty streets of Vysenia's Hill, to condemn the sinful life of the Faith before he had been chosen to reinstate its dignity.

The crowd cheered when Ser Robert Strong rode out proudly in the open, on a huge white stallion with silver harness and silver reins, wearing an immaculate white armour of the Kingsguard, especially built to fit a man of his giant size. The Queen Regent's smiths came on purpose to do only that, all the way down from Casterly Rock. He bowed before the High Septon, and presented his long white lance for the blessing, as a true knight who meant no harm.

His Holiness blessed the weapon and announced in a placid fatherly manner: "Ser Robert Strong, a Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard, the champion of the Queen Regent!"

Another knight in dark armour, thin and tall, even if much shorter in stature than Ser Robert Strong, rode out timidly from among the ordinary people. He emerged from the side of the Blackwater Bay, carefully guiding forward a large black horse, with attention not to hurt any of the smallfolk by a wrong step. The horse appeared much more dangerous than its rider. His lance was of middle length and the point of the spear intricately designed, a mastery of a single work of a smith. The point was forged together as one, but was clearly wrought of more different parts, metal and black stone. He wore a rounded wooden shield with a lonely tree on a red sunset field and a falling star.

Red stones gleamed on his breastplate almost resembling a pattern of the seven-pointed star. When he approached the High Septon, Brienne could see clearly that they were no jewels but a simple patient and long-lasting work of water on a non-precious common red stone.

She would have never recognised the Elder Brother if she didn't know beyond doubt it was him.

His Holiness frowned and declared briefly. "Surely, this must be some kind of mistake. The champion of the Faith has to wear the attire of the Faith."

To his words, a company of Warrior's Sons walked to the timid knight, forcing him to dismount, ignoring the occurrence when the mean black horse kicked one of them unconscious. They stripped the Elder Brother in front of the High Septon down to brown tunic and breeches, only barely preserving his modesty. They clad him in a light armour encrusted with many colourful crystals and handed him a lance with a white crystal spear-point, shining gracefully in the light of the morning. On his head they placed a light helm of leather, decorated with the embroidered image of the seven-pointed star. Finally, they brought him a lithe light brown courser, to replace the black animal from the seven hells. Five of them were needed to drag the ferocious black horse away by force, behind the lists, in the direction of the city.

Brienne was moved by pity for the older man, and wondered what would happen next and if he could still miraculously prevail in the ridiculous armour he was awarded. _It is as useful for him as the pink dress was for me,_ she remembered the Lord Bolton's gift, and felt a shameful pleasure that the Lord Bolton had died as he had lived, with his skin weaved in a sad white cloak of a wildling King-beyond-the-Wall.

"Your Faith will be your shield," declared one of the Warrior's Sons to a would be knight of their design.

And that was how they gave him no shield against the White Knight on his powerful white horse.

"No one can withstand the power of the Faith," whispered the sparrows, and the septas sighed from misplaced devotion, seeing how their champion now looked much more hallowed than he did before.

Only one tall septa, the tall highborn maid for whom Brienne had been searching in the riverlands for months, staggered nervously in the first row of the faith, tucking a strand of auburn hair under her headdress. A very tall man in a black tunic, wearing no armour except for a simple helm over his large face, tried to reassure her: "Do not despair. If he doesn't have the strength and the ability to fight, no metal will protect him."

A large direwolf wailed sadly from the septa's feet in direction of Ser Robert Strong, its lamentation strangely resembling some melodious words of a dead language that no one could speak any more. The wolf acted as if it wished to run to the White Champion, but the tall septa scratched it behind the ears and asked it to stay, calling it a good dog for all to hear. The animal stayed, howling in regular intervals, like a bird of bad omen.

Brienne noted that the High Septon gave a sharp displeased look to the direwolf, as if the ungodly animal posed a threat to his peaceful flock of men adoring the Seven.

"The Elder Brother of the Quiet Isle is now the champion of the Faith and the opponent of Ser Robert Strong in this trial," the High Septon announced and both riders trotted down the lists to the positions from which the joust would begin.

All eyes were on them, and Brienne rejoiced when no one paid attention to a tall boy with a hammer and an uncouth man in his odd cloak. Gendry and Mance Rayder were able to collect the gear the timid knight had worn before he was made to look like the Knight of Crystals. Then they stood aside and waited, quietly, for what the day would bring.

All eyes were on the champions, and no one, not even Brienne, to her disgrace, saw an army creeping slowly up the kingsroad unfolding the banners of the three-headed dragon as it went, unfolding the banners of fire, unfolding the banners of blood.

Three times the contenders rode past, and three times the lances clashed but both riders remained firmly in the saddle amidst the clatter of white armour on crystal, like two bright stars dressed to look like mortal men.

"Ser Robert is not good enough in jousting," the Hound said quietly to the Lady Sansa with rekindled hope. "Maybe he is not my brother."

"Or it is the gods that guide the Elder Brother's steps," Sansa observed.

"Or I am the Knight of Flowers," the Hound gave a dry laugh at a joke only he seemed to understand, earning him a reprimanding look of the blue eyes, under a pair of auburn eyebrows.

On the fourth pass, the white courser of the Knight of Crystals missed a step, and Ser Robert leaned from his saddle to unhorse him. The champion of the Faith remained hanging sideways on his beautiful horse and returned to his end of the lists. He was seemingly unable to straighten himself in the saddle, and the horse turned around for another pass, meek as a lamb ready for slaughter.

Forward they ran, the clumsy horse and the semi-conscious rider, to meet the onslaught of the White Foe, high as the Mountain.

Sansa prayed to the gods, old and new: "Please, help him! He believes in you, he does! Even if some others do not." Her tall companion had no comment to that, he only placed a huge hand on her right shoulder for a passing moment.

The champion of the Faith hung almost upside down, lifeless as a corpse, but when the White Knight of the Kingsguard passed him, aiming his faultless white lance to the middle of the hanged man's chest, the Elder Brother pulled himself half way up and held his crystal-topped lance as a flat bar in front of Ser Robert Strong's armoured belly. The spear point broke and splintered, but the force of the onslaught of the Kingsguard did the rest, and Ser Robert Strong flew forward, over the head of his horse. His flight spanned almost twenty feet in distance until he finally landed on his head, rolling in the dust, as a heap of precious white metal, tainted at last with the average dull grey colour of the world.

But the Elder Brother fared even worse. To hold the lance steady took all his force, and moments later than Ser Robert Strong, he also hit the ground. The horse of the Faith stepped on his chest with a single hoof, cracking the fancy crystal armour as a shell of a rotten egg. The Elder Brother screamed in pain, lay back and closed his eyes.

The crowd cried out in awe, and the High Septon was on his gnarled feet, motioning to his minions to check if any of the champions still lived. The eyes of His Holiness burned with the righteous flame of a man chosen by the gods who would soon win over all his enemies in a single stroke.

The sparrows moved forward as ordered, but their way to the champion of the Faith was blocked by the jointly drawn warhammer and longsword of Gendry and Mance Rayder. Three septas, and the Hound, already tended to the fallen man.

"Tell it to your priest, woman, tell him true!" Mance Rayder commanded one of the septas harshly, pointing at the crashed armour on the Elder Brother's chest. "I won't steal you for it, but I might think better of you."

"He lives, Your Holiness," Septa Tyene said to the High Sparrow, her golden brown face acquiring a livid shade of green, "but the majestic armour you have seen fit to award him with has been ruined. It tore open a very old wound on his chest, and nearly killed him. If this trial is to continue, he will have to wear the black armour he had chosen for himself. There is no other way in the face of the gods. Unless what you intended with this trial is to sentence the Elder Brother to his death."

His Holiness seemed most displeased, but he still nodded in agreement, looking expectantly at Ser Bonifer Hasty who went in person to check on the queen's champion, kneeling next to him.

No one paid attention to how the champion of the Faith was fast bandaged by the skilled hands of a pale septa, nor how Gendry and the Hound helped him to don his armour and to rise from the ashes as a black dragon reborn, under the watchful steel of Mance Rayder's sword.

For Ser Bonifer stood up, holding the head of Ser Robert Strong, severed from his body in the fall, and still covered with the immaculately white helm.

The crowd sighed in fear when Ser Bonifer unclasped it.

Revealing auburn curly hair and lifeless blue eyes of a young man who had let others call him the King in the North, before he lost his life to a vain lord he had failed to take as a father-in-law.

Brienne knew she had no time to lose. She moved swiftly among the people towards the Queen Regent.

**Elder Brother**

The Elder Brother rose in great pain from the freshly open chest wound, which very nearly cost him his life in the Battle of the Trident. Septa Lemore and Septa Tyene dressed it well but the pain was still searing.

Dimly aware of his surroundings, first he noticed Nymeria spring forward from the crowd, toppling Ser Bonifer over like a wooden puppet. Lady Sansa dressed like a septa was not far behind the wolf. Running to Ser Bonifer in the mud, she took a severed head from his hands, crying louder than a mother whose infant child had been taken away from her breast to be impaled on a sword.

"Robb!" she sobbed. "Couldn't they let you die after they had killed you?"

"My lords and ladies," Sansa cried, "this is my brother, Lord Robb Stark, murdered at the Twins as a guest on a wedding!" And then to King Tommen: "Your Grace! My brother was a traitor to your reign, but still the laws of men and the sacred teachings of the Faith order that his remains shall be buried with dignity. Not that his head is sewed to another body..."

Wiping tears larger than crystals on the armour the Elder Brother had been forced to wear, Sansa lifted the head high up in the air so that all could see the threads still hanging from the severed neck, mingled with drops of thick black blood.

"This is a crime in the eyes of the gods and I implore the King and the High Septon for justice," she said but her words were hushed by a mighty roar. The headless armoured body of Ser Robert Strong stood up from the ground, and advanced to a confused Ser Bonifer Hasty still sitting in the mud. A huge arm grabbed the knight's neck and cracked it as if it were a dry twig before he could make a peep. The body then looked for a sword, and took one from another Warrior's Son, cutting the man in two as it did so, easily as if he was made of reed, and not of sinew and bone.

The body advanced towards Sansa, still crying over her brother, maybe in desire to put its head back on, or in a blind killing fury, the Elder Brother found it hard to tell. Nymeria leapt on the corpse, only to be thrown away by a sweep of a huge hand, as if she were a weak cur, kicked by a vicious master. The Hound, armed with a greatsword stood in front of Sansa in no time, barring the way with his body.

"I'd told you once that I would die for you," he told her and raised his sword.

Sansa screamed in shock.

But before the dead and the living brother could clash, the elected champion of the Faith, against his will or not, stood firmly on his two feet behind the headless body and said in an iron voice: "I am your enemy, creature of the underworld."

The body hesitated, unsure about whom to attack.

The Elder Brother turned to look back, at Septa Lemore and Septa Tyene, but their faces radiated only utter calm. Septa Lemore's headdress was shorter than it should have been and he wondered if that was what she tied around his wound. _What is wrong with me?_ he thought. _Do I suddenly expect a septa to grant me her favour, a ribbon, or a smile? Only because she did her duty, to heal those in need?_

He still had to touch a bandage on his chest. He still had to look back one more time. Whatever he wanted, it was stronger than him. And he was certain that he had not found it. Yet.

The corpse made another step in direction of Sansa, and crossed swords with the Hound, initiating a deadly dance of equals between a dead brother who had no face, and a living one who only had half.

Sansa screamed harder and set Robb's head carefully on the ground. Then she returned to the corpse of Ser Bonifer and pulled out his sword, holding it up in trembling, unpractised hands, in direction of the men fighting, determined to help in any way she could.

The Elder Brother did not look back any more.

"I am your opponent!" he shouted from the top of his lungs, his blood boiling black in an unstoppable blazing fury. "The High Septon said I was to fight you, I, the Elder Brother of the Quiet Isle!"

Two black lines of fear were etched deep on the wrinkled forehead of His Holiness, when the champion of the people he had created remembered his holy name in his anger.

The body understood the Elder Brother, or merely heard the loudest of all voices. It turned around and paid its undivided attention to the insolent challenger.

The Knight of the Faith was no longer timid, and no longer made of crystal. The red stones on his chest gleamed next to the shimmering painted trail of the falling star on his shield. The stones no longer resembled the seven-pointed star, despite all Sansa's efforts to that end, revealing instead the broad lines of the once mighty royal sigil Aerys II had worn on his breastplate, unseen in the capital since his demise.

"Three heads has the dragon," Sansa whispered the words from one of the old scrolls of Maester Luwyn in Winterfell, lowering the sword she hastily took. She grabbed the Hound's left arm, and was glad that her touch made him relent and observe the change in the Elder Brother.

The black clad champion held no sword, only a masterfully crafted middle length lance with a black shining spear end, which he didn't hold in his right hand any more, but in his left.

 _I am left handed! In battle, at least,_ the Elder Brother remembered, and for the first time since the Trident the memory was real, like a full juicy taste of a summer fruit, not an empty knowledge of the life he had lived.

"I am your enemy," repeated the Elder Brother, devoid of fear, to the armoured headless monster towering above him like a desolate mountain over a lesser hill.

And when what was left of Gregor approached, and raised the stolen longsword to kill, the Elder Brother lifted the rounded wooden shield with the right hand to meet the blow.

"For Elia," he whispered, "the most innocent of women."

It sounded like one of the old songs, but it was the best reason he could remember.

A surge of red and golden flames burst forward from the falling star painted on the Elder Brother's shield, devouring the white armour of the walking corpse as if it were a thatched roof of a house of the poor, and not made of forged metal. And where it passed, the fire revealed black charred flesh in the middle of the body's cursed belly.

"For Elia," the Elder Brother vowed again, words mingled with tears. "For Elia, Rhaenys and Aegon, for whom no one was there when they should have been," his voice lamented, defeated.

But his left arm still had strength. It held no regret and it did not falter when it buried the spear point of obsidian and Valyrian steel deep into the monster's guts, turning it around to cause the biggest possible damage.

The body walked in circles, and fumed, and steamed, and roared, and dropped to the ground, twitching like an animal unsuccessfully slaughtered. It was still alive, yes, but it lost all strength and the ability to fight.

Unable to lift a little finger from the ground, the corpse lay still, and moaned and gurgled pitifully.

"For Elia," the Elder Brother said once more, before the new wave of pain in his chest forced him to sit down.

**Aegon**

"Mother," the young Usurper, Tommen, said, breaking the silence that had fallen over the field. "The monk won and your champion lost. Must I condemn you now? You told me this was not going to pass…"

But the Queen Cersei was not with her son and no one could tell when and where she left.

"You will not condemn anyone any more, my son," said Lady Olenna with kindness. "The time for play is over." The watching crowd opened up, to let through the Golden Company, proudly flying in the open air the banners with the three-headed dragon of the House Targaryen.

A young lad, barely more than a boy, with long silver hair, rode forward, and Lord Mace Tyrell readily knelt in front of him. "Your Grace, please accept from our hands the Usurper, Tommen, bastard of Cersei Lannister with her brother Jaime Lannister. If it please you, I shall kill him in your stead!"

"But you are my father-in-law!" said Tommen looking at Lord Mace and then towards his queen who withdrew behind her grandmother and looked modestly towards the ground. "You swore that my father was King Robert and that Uncle Jaime was lying!"

Lord Tyrell put a hand on his sword, clumsily attached to his belt, but the silver-haired rider lifted his arm. "I, Aegon of the House Targaryen, Sixth of My Name, the King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, by the grace of the gods the rightful Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm do not wish to start my rule by spilling blood of children. That is what the grandfather of this Usurper did when he ordered my death. Surely a suitable accommodation can be found for Tommen until the true king's justice can be decided for his crimes."

Lord Mace said something under his voice to two of his personal guards, bearing the rose of Highgarden high on their chests. They took little Tommen away while the boy struggled and cried to Aegon in a child's voice, sounding suddenly older than the scarce number of his name days: " _They_ are the real traitors! Just like my mother said and I never believed her because Lady Margaery gave me kittens! They _will_ betray you as well!"

Aegon visibly shivered from the boy's words and chose to look away, not to show any weakness in his kingly armour.

A familiar almost purple-eyed septa stepped out from the crowd of the people of the Faith, ending the unease Aegon felt. She bowed deeply, and fell on her knees, presenting him a naked greatsword of Valyrian steel. The colours of silver, pearl and ivory danced and rippled on the blade, glowing as a sign of a new hope in the cold light of the morning.

"Your Grace," she said. "A sword from Prince Rhaegar was not preserved after the battle of the Trident. But we who stood by your side since you were saved from the Red Keep as an infant have been able to preserve a sword of one of his best friends and most loyal Sworn Brothers of the Kinsguard, Ser Arthur Dayne. This sword is named Dawn, Your Grace, the Sword of the Morning, as its previous master had been. And it is yours for the keeping."

Aegon dismounted and walked to the kneeling septa, gladly accepting the gift. "Please, rise, Septa Lemore. I would not have you kneel in my presence for you have been like a mother to me. And nothing will please me more than to wield this sword. May I be found worthy of the great knight who wore it before me!"

Septa Lemore rose as she was bid an urgently whispered a few choice words to the ear of the new self-proclaimed King. They made him turn towards Lord Tyrell and say in a cold voice. "See to it that young Tommen lives in the accommodation you have just attributed him. Should he die, your life will be forfeit as well."

"Well spoken, Your Grace", said the elderly knight with very short orange hair, dismounting behind the King. "Like a true king."

"Lord Connington," Aegon recognised him with respect, "you will take the badge of the Hand of the King from Lord Tyrell from now on. I am convinced that he will not mind."

"Your Grace," a shaggy commoner unknown to Aegon, in a peculiar light-coloured cloak, barged in on the conversation of his betters, not showing much regard for the new king in his attitude, where at least he showed some in his words. Aegon noticed that the man was standing as a leader at the forefront of a very mismatched group of abandoned people, nursing each other in the middle of the lists made for the Queen Regent's trial. "It may be just a little bit too soon to celebrate your victory. Look!"

The fearless looking cloaked man pointed at the Blackwater Bay gleaming blue in the distance. There a black mass of sails rolled on the water, from the far lands towards the capital, headed by a pair of large black wings obstructing the lucid clearness of the sky.

"Dromonds, dromonds in the north," the commander of the Golden Company cried out.

"Dromonds and galleys and more ships to come!" one of his sellswords responded to the call.

"A thousand ships," a beautiful auburn-haired septa exhaled dreamily at the unearthly beauty of it all. Aegon almost shivered again when he realised that the septa had been holding a man's severed head as a treasured possession, with the colour of the hair equally auburn as her own.

Septa Lemore whistled quietly in a non-ladylike manner. Her prophetic dark eyes became glued to the menacing distance, burning like an honest lighthouse, showing the way home to the honourable sailors and to the smugglers and the pirates alike.

Then she just said. "Daenerys has come!"


	26. The Stairway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Jaime doesn't go down, but up the rabbit hole.

**Aegon**

Aegon, Sixth of his Name, sat on the Iron Throne, and no seat had ever felt less comfortable.

The city was under siege. Lord Connington counselled him to withdraw within its walls before his aunt would arrive, and the new member of his small council they picked up on the way agreed. His name was… Baelish… and Aegon found it hard to remember it, but he found it even harder to appreciate the man. Still, Jon was adamant that his own naivety in matters of what was fair in battle was one of the reasons for which Aegon's father lost the war and the Usurper won the rebellion. Jon would never make the same mistake again.

"We need people like Lord Baelish on our side," Jon insisted. "Well paid by us," Septa Lemore clarified. Jon explained. "They see things as they are and not as they should be in an honest world."

Aegon accepted it but he could still not appreciate the thin green-eyed man who reminded him of small grey lizards in the valley of Rhoyne, illusive and impossible to catch, always running around after their own errands and not after anybody else's.

The Golden Company manned the walls with the help of the gold cloaks of the city guard, and the remaining soldiers of the House Tyrell. But the alliance of the roses did not come freely. Aegon has barely started his reign, and he already had two marriage offers to consider. Lord Tyrell offered his daughter Margaery, twice wed and still a maid. Lord Baelish on the other hand suggested he should marry a Princess in the North, Lady Sansa Stark, the last living heir of the greatest House of Westeros after his own.

But Lady Margaery's hair had a wrong shade of black, and while he found Lady Stark lovely to behold, she had left him cold at heart.

Aegon noticed the auburn-haired beauty when he first declared his claim in the fields in front of the Dragon Gate. But all he could remember of her now, seated on the Iron Throne, was the severed head she held tight. The red colour of the blood of the earth covered her brows, enhancing the blue of her eyes and of the dead ones of her desecrated brother. The sight had frightened Aegon more than anything he had ever seen. It made him recall the nameless things in the tall lonely woods north of the capital from which he was saved by a whim of fate, and by a maid who would never show him her face. _The old gods are cursing my reign,_ he thought. _They have no love for the Targaryens, never had. Their King Torrhen knelt to a dragon, not to a king, and I have no dragons to tame their fury._

He didn't know what to make of the Seven either. The High Septon's striking exhibition of poverty and strictness, in support of the values of the Faith Aegon's great ancestors took for their own, seemed just and noble. But he postponed the blessing due to the rightful king _until the times would settle down and the Seven would find it proper._

For the first time since he landed in Westeros, Aegon felt anger bubbling in his veins, and in return he did at least one thing he himself wanted to do, ever since he started his rule.

He refused all counsels from Lord Connington and Lord Baelish on the matter, and let all the people who gathered for the trial go free, not even asking who they were. Lord Connington told him not to do it, and Lord Baelish said he was signing the ruin of his reign. According to them, he should have thrown in the black cells, at least, a foreign singer who styled himself King-beyond-the-Wall as well as a former sworn shield of the dead Usurper, Joffrey, and confined the Lady Sansa to the Red Keep as a valuable hostage to win over the loyalty of the North, by marriage, or by sword if needs be.

Aegon remembered again the thing that hunted him in the dark. That was a creature of the north, Lord Arryn told him, and Aegon could not believe its loyalty could be won at all, and much less by imprisoning ladies.

So Aegon turned deaf ears to his councillors' demands, and gripped Dawn for reassurance. It felt like the only solid heritage from the days when his father was still alive, and it was as if a voice of a knight long dead spoke through his mouth when he managed to open it.

"I am no rightful king yet," he told them, "so I will dispense justice when I am anointed and crowned. It's not like anyone can leave the capital until the siege is over." Aegon gave Lady Sansa her leave to bury her brother, and he had the twitching headless body of a monster caged in a dragonpit, under heavy iron bars that had not been used since the last dragons of old died.

And the siege continued because Daenerys would not come forward. The messengers they sent out to propose talks did not return. Her fleet anchored peacefully on the Black Water Bay, and the black wings of the newly hatched black dragon flew protectively above it. Aegon regretted withdrawing within the walls. He knew in his heart that he should have stayed in the open and risked waiting for his aunt. Now he would never be able to talk to her in person. And the longer he thought about her, she was just another lady he didn't want to marry even if he was most curious to meet her. Would she want to kill her own nephew? The bloody history of his family told him anything was possible. Daenerys did not attack, but she may have been only bidding time to make her move.

"We have to send more messengers to my aunt," he said, to say something, for decision was expected from one who would be king.

"I took the liberty of sending out some of my own, to the Free Cities, when we were still on the way to the capital," Lord Baelish informed him, bowing to the ground. "They left a very generous gift in a very old place called The Temple of Black and White in Braavos when they were done delivering messages. I trust that the acolytes serving the god of that temple will provide us with the means to solve the situation with your aunt, Your Grace."

"What is your meaning, my lord?" Aegon asked, puzzled.

"A good one, Your Grace, the best one," Baelish reassured him with flowery words. "The rightful king should not trouble himself with all the little details of his rule. That's what your faithful councillors are for."

"Lord Baelish was a master of coin," Jon Connington said. "We agreed that he would continue in this function. It is only natural for him to continue the relations of the crown with Braavos where the Iron Bank has its seat."

"Was that what your message was about, my lord? Coin?" asked Septa Lemore, silent until that moment in the shadows of the throne room.

"Allow me to remind you that I am still a lord, Septa Lemore," the green-eyed man said in a friendly voice. "My business is my own and I have been nothing but loyal to His Grace since I had the chance to join his cause."

"Forgive me, my lord," septa said, "it would seem that the vows of my order have still not quenched the woman's curiosity in my mind. I trust that you will inform His Grace of any messages that might concern him, or his aunt, Princess Daenerys Stormborn."

"I will not fail to do so, in time," vowed Lord Baelish, sounding inexplicably sincere for the first time.

Aegon didn't know what to think of that conversation. It was innocent, and it was not. He suddenly had to stand up, for one of the blades the throne was made of was about to cut through his hastily made royal garments and draw out fresh blood.

"Let us make a recess," he said. "I should like to discuss matters with my personal guard now."

"A King should name his Kingsguard," Jon objected, as he did many times before, to Aegon's choice of companions, "not surround himself by children."

"When the Seven bless my rule, my lord and my friend, no sooner than that," Aegon said firmly. "Allow me to remind you: if it weren't for these _children_ I would not be among you now."

Luckily enough there was nothing anyone could say to that. The door of the throne room went ajar, and then wide open, as if its heavy wooden wings and rusty creaking hinges could hear the thoughts of the latest king. Young Lord Dayne led them all in; Lord Arryn, Blackwood, Peckledon, Piper and Paege. Willow walked last, followed by her sister, always hidden. Jeyne exchanged her simple dark cloak for a luxurious velvety one, black with shades of purple. She must have found it somewhere in the palace. Long black tresses fell from out of the hollow where her face must have been, as always, the only visible part of her real body. Aegon felt better seeing them all. Besides Jon, and Lemore, they were the only people he trusted in Westeros, so far.

"Your Grace," Lord Dayne bowed before him. "We will go as messengers tomorrow, if needs be. We are all ready."

"I will consider your brave offer," Aegon said, "and I will give you my answer in the morning."

"We should leave His Grace alone to ponder his decisions," Septa Lemore suggested, and Aegon was deeply grateful to her when everyone turned to bowing again and taking their respective leave.

Trying to rule the Seven Kingdoms was not at all what he expected it to be.

**Septa Lemore**

Septa Lemore remained standing in one of the well-shaped porches of the Red Keep contemplating whether to go to the fisherfolk or not when she was startled by the company she didn't particularly cherish or desire.

"A noble septa would do well to guard her tongue," Lord Baelish approached her from behind.

"Perhaps," she replied with unfeigned humility. "His Grace is too kind to listen to my voice."

"Or maybe a noble septa is not who she seems to be," Petyr continued and she raised a brow, suddenly curious as to _what_ he came to tell her, precisely, and _why_.

"Knowledge is power, Septa Lemore, or should I say, my lady," he drooled on and Septa Lemore wished she could leave but there was no easy way out. They were alone in the porch, and she had no weapon, not even a sewing needle. There was no other solution but to listen to Petyr.

"What would Aegon say if he knew that the septa who raised him is in reality the unfortunate Lady Ashara Dayne, former lover of his enemy Brandon Stark whom his grandfather the Mad King burned for treason… I wonder if he would have understanding for the sad story… She even had a bastard son with Brandon if I heard correctly, whom poor Ned Stark, the Seven have mercy on his soul, may or may not have raised like his own…"

Septa Lemore did not like where the story was going, not in the least, nor what she had to do next. But either courtesy or silence was no longer a viable choice.

"What an interesting story," she told him, flushing her eyes purple under long grey eyelashes and standing taller on her boots. "Let me tell you another, even more interesting one in my opinion. There was a thin boy of a lesser house from the Fingers who fought a duel for the love of his life, a daughter of one of the great houses of Westeros. And he lost. He licked his wounds, and out of spite he took her sister's maidenhead. It was freely offered, we have to say in his defence, and he left the maid deflowered, with child. The girl's Lord Father made her drink tea, made of tansy, mint, wormwood, honey, and a single drop of pennyroyal. Have you ever heard about it, my lord? The poor lady lost that child, as she lost many children after that. Many except for the one that His Grace seems very attached to these days…"

Septa Lemore had to stop talking because a tip of a short dagger was suddenly pointed at her throat. Lord Baelish pinned her to the inner wall of the porch by his sinewy little body. He was shorter than her in her boots, but the most likely Valyrian steel in his hands was not to be trifled with.

"Young Lord Arryn's health is very delicate," Lord Baelish suggested mildly, seemingly unconcerned about her tale, or the cruel position he put her in. "I do hope that his sickness will allow him to faithfully serve His Grace for many years. Perhaps he should not be bothered by such old stories. He knows how dearly I loved his mother and how cruelly I punished the singer who took her life."

"Now, there you have it, my lord, you've just staid yourself. You should do well to remember that Lord Robert Arryn is not only a sickly child," Septa Lemore said peacefully, in an effort not to move.

"I feel that you will tell me what else he may be in case that I did not remember, Lady Dayne," Petyr said cynically.

"Of course I will," Lemore's reply did not tardy, sharp and colder than ice. "He's a falcon."

"Of course he is, my lady, I would never forget such a thing. It is a noble sigil," Baelish dismissed her words and let her go, laughing incredulously, as one relieved and finally convinced she might be a stupid harmless woman after all, crying over the past. He did not understand her meaning, as few men would, and mostly not the dwellers of the capital. Which was only good.

Septa Lemore looked at the yard. It was a fine autumn's day and her feet itched on too high heels to go for a little walk. A ride would be even better but septas were not supposed to ride. If she did that, soon everyone would know about Lady Ashara Dayne.

The good thing about being a septa was that bastards like Baelish could not offer her a hand or any other form of lordly courtesy; it would not be proper.

"With your leave, my lord, if I may be excused," she told him with feigned sweetness, and walked away down the porch, keen on getting away.

It was the first time she entered the Red Keep in her life, and she was afraid she would hear Arthur's voice, and Rhaegar's, or the screams of the Mad King's victims, at every corner. But it was only a palace made of pink stones. It had no soul, lost or not.

She concluded that perhaps there was no harm in going to the fisherfolk after all. Aegon could hold out a little bit on his own.

His army of children would watch over him, better than the Golden Company, and much better than any septa.

**Sandor**

The fire burned out slowly in the hearth, turning into dust the last remnants of Lord Robb Stark.

Sansa knelt next to it, humble like a lantern in the crypt put out by a strong draught, and Mance stood next to her as if he were a family member. Sandor Clegane paced behind them, near the house door, trying to slow down and not to show his unease. He wanted to offer her words of comfort, but he found none. And he didn't think she should suffer more of his unmeasured sincerity on that day of all days. So he muttered under the voice something about going to look for Stranger and stepped out.

The Elder Brother was seated on the broad doorstep of the house, which was one step better than being on the wall, his honest face bare.

"No cowl?" Sandor said, to say something.

"Small point in that now," the monk answered. "I stepped out of boundaries the Faith is teaching. I was irascible, angry. That is not the way of the Seven. I have to find my place again."

"Well," Sandor observed, "you didn't break any vows. The faith forbids to kill a man. But first of all, Gregor was not a man. And then, you didn't even kill him, you defeated him. Some would say there is a difference."

"Brother," the Elder Brother smiled, "that was well said. And entirely untrue. I was so enraged that I was not myself."

"I did learn a thing or two about twisting the truth to serve one's purpose in all my years at court," the Hound said, sitting down next to the older man, forgetting his invented need to find his horse for a moment.

It was a good autumn day, they all walked free, and there was time for everything. It was only the four of them in the house, for Gendry, Blackwood and Daven went to look for the tall lady knight who had given them the miraculous shield. She went missing after the trial, and Gendry was worried about the aurochs of the woman. The Hound tried to correct his thoughts not to offend the lady. After all, she was still much better looking than he would ever be. And fierce, he had to give her that. Like the little bird's sister.

Seated, he could hear voices. _Her voice, the softest of all voices,_ to make it worse, having a power over him than no voice ever did. Than the wildling's. He wanted to stand up, but the Elder Brother held him firmly in place, motioning him to stay silent.

"What do you want from him, Sansa?" Mance Rayder asked. "It's not my place to ask but I am asking anyway. We have come far together and it is only that I wish you both well. It would pain me if you would come to harm by reading roles in my show."

"You ask, yet you will never tell me about your errand on behalf of my brother," Sansa reproached him. "Not everything."

"Forgive me, Sansa, but words can be tortured out of people. I have seen it."

"And you only trust yourself if that should pass," Sansa said gently. "It makes sense. It is just that I would wish to know."

"You will," the wildling said, trying to sound kind. "In time."

"But to answer your question," Sansa said after a pause, "most of the time I don't know myself. At times, I dream… I dream of him, and of no one else, treating me just like a knight from the songs of old, only more noble than any of them, whispering sweet words. I wish him to ride over the seas only to bring me a flower, or an expensive gift. I dream of him being gallant, more gallant than any other knight I have ever known… I dream of him swearing eternal love to me, not asking for anything in return..."

Sansa paused, embarrassed. "It's silly, I know..."

"Not at all, Sansa," Mance was of a different opinion. "Women need to be flattered."

"What would you know about the silly hearts of girls?"

"Not enough in a lifetime," Mance said. "And more than most, perhaps. A bard knows of the desires of the heart. And they lay siege on men and women both. In different ways, maybe, but still."

The Hound stumbled on his feet at the house door but the Elder Brother stopped him from falling, by a swift motion of his left arm.

"Sansa, it is natural, a maid sometimes cannot know what she wants, or what a man wants from her- "

"But I am a woman wed and he knows it, Sandor Clegane does," Sansa said seriously. "Maybe I am even a widow! And I would have been wed for the second or even the third time if Lord Baelish was able to annul my first marriage or to find proof of my husband's death."

"Forgive me, Sansa, I thought you a maid. It makes no matter," the King-beyond-the-Wall said earnestly. "You seem so young. It is no wonder that you are looking for answers."

Outside, Sandor stood up like a dog turned restless from being tied in the kennels for far too long. He walked to the wall so that he could not hear the voices. "This _isn't_ about me," he denied what both men had heard clearly. "It can't be."

His fearsome rasp was barely a whisper.

"Who else?" the Elder Brother asked, coming after him. "Ser Daven? Robert's boy? I think not."

The Hound turned his burns towards the Elder Brother so that the other man could see them in great detail, not saying a word. To his surprise, the older man grasped his tunic and tugged at his bandaged chest.

"Brother, don't," the Hound protested, confused, removing the sight of his burns which had such unusual effect to the man who had now saved his life more than just once.

But the monk continued, implacable, until Sandor Clegane looked, for the very first time at the naked chest of the Elder Brother.

His chest was also a ruin, not of burns, but of an old wound such that it had covered all the space between his relatively broad shoulders and crept all the way down to his stomach. It looked as if more horses than just one have walked over the hedge knight in the battle of the Trident. And while the twisted mass of ruined skin was not on his face, the ugliness of it was as undeniable as the rising and the setting of the sun.

"Is this any prettier?" he asked, voice trembling, "I was lucky to fall in the river after this. The water washed it out and kept it open, and the wound didn't fester until the former Elder Brother found me and patched me together."

"As you patched me," the Hound said, petting his thigh, turning into brooding silence while the monk fixed his own bandage back on the part of the wound which reopened with the practised hands of a healer. The tunic was soon on him, the ugliness swept away.

"Forgive me, brother," Sandor Clegane stuttered his clumsy courtesies after a time. "I have to take my leave from you. I intend to return soon, and on my two feet, not on the cart for pigs. Please."

"I believe you," the monk said, and sank back on the doorstep, watching him go.

**Elder Brother**

The Elder Brother soon felt guilty for allowing his brother to leave because the conversation on the inside continued. It was embarrassing to eavesdrop, but he still decided to hear it all. The impulse was stronger than him.

"And then, then…" Sansa had difficulty to find words. "There are other times…"

"Which other times, Sansa?"

"The other times, I want something else, and that frightens me more than anything else has ever frightened me before," Sansa said in guise of a discovery reached at the expense of great pain.

"What is it, Sansa?" Mance encouraged her to talk.

"I want him, rude and cruel, just as he is. No sweet words, and no sweet face. His fierceness, his scars, his overgrown body, his awful words, everything that he is. Even when drunk. It hurts me to want him that way, but I don't want it to stop. Ever."

"Well, to feel that, Sansa, for anyone, is a great thing," Mance said seriously. "Don't let it frighten you so, and maybe it will all come out for good."

"And there is even more to it," Sansa admitted. "I slowly stopped caring about where I am, or thinking about where I should be going since I recognised him in the Quiet Isle. I can be anywhere as long as he is by my side."

"I'm sorry for asking you about it, Sansa," Mance said. "I should have known. You are Jon's blood, in that at least. You do not play at affection."

"And I do not want him to die for me!" Sansa continued as if Mance did not say anything in between. "As he seems to desire!" the words ran out of her mouth unstoppable as the life blood leaving a battered body of a soldier through a mortal wound.

"I want him to live for me. Now and for all days," she said, her voice barely a whisper, just like the Hound's, moments ago.

The direwolf bayed in front of the hearth as though she were a dog in truth, and not only in Sansa's empty courtesies meant for others. Sansa looked through Mance, changing the conversation, immediately more distant and unreachable than the Elder Brother imagined the Wall. "Nymeria is restless. I have to go to her. There's something else brewing, more dangerous than my silly wishes."

"I have felt it as well," the wildling said. "The world is getting dark. What is more, I was going to ask you if you would go with me tonight."

"Where to?" Sansa asked.

"Since the new king's men are rather incapable to end this siege any time soon, and I don't have that much time to waste, I will scale the walls of the city to go down, as close as possible to the other camp. Then I will sneak into presence of Daenerys Targaryen under the banner of peace."

"What makes you believe that you will succeed where the king's heralds have failed?"

"My need is greater than theirs," Mance simply said. "Will you go?"

Sansa nodded mutely and went to Nymeria who was howling sadly at the ashes in the hearth. Robb's remains fit in a small bowl of clay. Sansa closed it off with a lid, and the Elder Brother wished that she would one day be able to lay them to rest properly, in the deep crypts of the Lords of Winterfell.

The monk coughed loudly and decided it was as good a time as any to make his presence known.

"Oh, Elder Brother," Sansa became flushed under her hair from surprise. "Have you come back alone?"

"Yes. I met Sandor in the street, he went to look for Stranger," the Elder Brother lied, hoping that his own face remained pale as the gods have made it, and that it was not turning into any other coloration. "He will be right back. Will you be reading on tonight?"

"That we will," Mance said. "We have to start early. I hope that Rhaegar won't be late."

"I don't think he will," the monk added.

The heap of devoted shoes of all shapes and sizes rose ten feet high, almost half way up the city wall. The Elder Brother remembered he should thank Blackwood when he would return for not attending the trial. Accidental of not, his absence also kept the ravens away. And the monk thought that he would have gone mad if amidst what was happening to him in combat, a black bird would have landed on his forehead.

Another autumn evening was drawing near, purple like old the blood of the innocents, drying on the steel of the strong.

**Jaime**

Jaime was hungry.

But a thousand times stronger than hunger was a gnawing doubt that Brienne betrayed their understanding, that she became jealous of Cersei and let the trial take its course without freeing him. Then with some luck, Cersei would be gone for good and... The voice of Lord Tywin let the events in Jaime's head unfold until he saw clearly the Lady Brienne of Casterly Rock, more treacherous than Cersei and undeserving of the title.

 _Stop it_ , he would tell Tywin, _she's the most honourable wench in existence."_

But then his thoughts would swirl further into madness. Jaime imagined the Red Keep burning above everyone who had ever betrayed him, stone and flesh swallowed by a terrible beauty of the flames…

And even worse than the repulsive doubts and yearnings that shamed him was the sensation of emptiness in both the hand he had and the one he did not, where a long feminine body had lied and given itself to the budding life of the senses.

He welcomed the real voices and the thrumming of heavy steps of soldier boots resounding in the dungeons. But his joy was immediately cut short.

They were bringing a boy.

 _It could not be, it should not be,_ he thought. The child resisted his captors in vain and was locked up somewhere, judging by the sound just below Jaime.

Below...

Jaime did not waste time. He took the White Book of the Kinsguard with him and walked to the black cell Qyburn used for his wicked maestery. His instincts were right. On the soft ground of a gloomy cell stood Tommen, dressed in a kingly fashion. but his face was that of a frightened child. The royal silks shone darkly, misplaced and unnecessary, in the eerie purple light of the cursed candle.

"Uncle," he said, and put two fingers over his mouth as if he were afraid to be reprimanded for calling Jaime the way he had called him all his life.

"Tommen," Jaime said with as much kindness and warmth he could muster in the black cells, ignoring the boy's obvious unease. He crouched to be at Tommen's height, and spread his arms wide open. Soon they were filled by a mass of sobs, a shaking little body and a flood of confessions in a tiny voice.

"The monk, he won... Mother's champion, he was a monster! I was so scared when he walked headless... But mother, mother was gone. And than Lord Mace said to the Targaryen pretender I was a bastard and offered to kill me... And Margaery wouldn't look at me. But the pretender, he... he is young, he spared me... They brought me here..."

"Everything will be all right, Tommen," Jaime tried to reassure his son, not believing a single one of his own words. More likely, they would both meet the sword of the new King's Justice, before long. "Here, Tommen, take heart and look at this book. It's about the Kingsguard and many brave things its Sworn Brothers have done in the past. They were victorious in the thick of many battles."

Tommen cried a little bit more, but than he obeyed. They sat together on a spot where the soil was not unbearably soft for Jaime's liking. His son was soon absorbed by the lives described in the White Book in great detail, while Jaime's mind raced about what he could possibly do to keep them alive.

After a while, Tommen pointed at the entry about the legendary Lord Commander of Kingsguard of King Aegon V the Unlikely, Ser Duncan the Tall.

"The description of his sigil, uncle! The monk wore it painted on his shield, a single tree, and a falling star on a sunset field! Then the trail of the falling star spat fire and burned the monster through his armour," Tommen said in astonishment. "Is the champion of the Faith the descendant of Ser Duncan the Tall?"

"I don't think so, Tommen," Jaime discarded the thought, but another one came, the thought that wouldn't leave his mind in the blackness, illuminated only by the sinister purple glow of the candle. _Brienne... No wonder that the dragon blessed your shield! In your innocence you wore a sigil of a dragonfriend... Did you even know what it was? I have never seen a sigil like that... Nor read the entire White Book as I should have done with my own legacy, and that of my Sworn Brothers before me... Tyrion would have known..._

"The monster," Jaime had to ask looking at the glass candle steadily burning in the dark, "did it die?"

"No, uncle," Tommen shook his head, "but it is helpless, it lies like a puddle of dirty water, barely moving."

So Tommen told him the rest, about Robb Stark's head and Lady Sansa's grief and the tall knight who defended her, and how she drew a dead man's sword to defend him in return, like Queen Naerys defended her Prince Aemon in the songs. Until the champion of the Faith outshone them all with a bravery unheard of, not even in tales, challenging a monster to fight him to death. Tommen's eyes let out the tears of admiration then, until his story came back to the beginning, or an end. To the moment when he was almost sentenced to die, and was spared by the kindness of a complete stranger. His young face looked old then, older than the world.

Manly voices echoed again between the ancient walls, and Jaime said: "Shhhh!"

The feet were too many. The soldiers stopped talking as they approached, but the clatter of swords and daggers could not be mistaken, rattling hastily down the winding stairs.

It seemed as if the roses decided to follow Lord Tywin's example of dealing with children of their new enemies rather than to heed their latest merciful king. Jaime thanked the gods he didn't believe in for being just enough the son of his father to conceive and anticipate life's simple cruelty, such as it was. So he said to Tommen, determined, taking in a worried look the boy gave to the door.

"Tommen," he said with the calm he didn't feel. "We will play a game. See."

He took a long metallic instrument from the table, the sturdiest one he could find, glad he could not know about the real use it had for Qyburn after Tommen's stories. Especially after the presence of a sewing needle among the tools was suddenly explained by an appearance of the head of Robb Stark on the body of Gregor Clegane.

Jaime attacked the masonry next to the door hinges of the locked door, through which Tommen was brought in, and which Cersei and Qyburn also used. His efforts were soon awarded by the cracking of the hollow stone. He gave pliers to Tommen and bid him continue, while he loosened the stones on the other side. Enough parts of masonry soon collapsed from both sides of the wall, behind the door, partially blocking the way for anyone who would want to unlock it from the outside.

 _There,_ he thought. _They don't have the key to my cell. Brienne has it._ _And this should give us some time._

"Excellent, Tommen, you win!" he told his son who enthusiastically pushed the rubble all over the room even when it was no longer necessary.

Jaime violently pulled the tablecloth from under the instruments, immensely enjoying the fall and the breaking of some of the more delicate ones. With a long sharp knife, he cut out four long bandages out of the dark cloth, which he wrapped around his hand, his stump and his bare feet. He gave the edges of the cloth still remaining to Tommen. "Hold it," he said, and with his son's help he made a bag in which he put the White Book, and as a last thought, a glass candle, still burning purple on the soft ground hiding Qyburn victims' graves. He tightened the bag to his chest as he saw the lowborns carry their infants in the fields of Casterly Rock. Contrary to his expectations, he had found the bundle quite cool against his coarse tunic, although the cursed burning candle was in it.

"Come, Tommen," he said, "now it's time to play leave my castle."

The boy nodded and followed. Jaime could see that he understood that the knights where coming to murder him, but he kept quiet and pretended not to. _Cersei has trained him well,_ he thought, proud of his son.

They went down the corridor, but not to Jaime's cell. To the hot high wall with a primitive stairway dug in its side. A long line of irregular holes in the masonry, leading up until the eye could see. Where, it could not be told. Jaime clenched his teeth and touched one of the holes on the wall.

They were lucky. Obviously his first impression was wrong, the wall was not scalding, only mildly hot, and with the bandages he should be able to stand the heat, even with the unknown distance of the climb.

Voices were now in Qyburn's room and past the barrier of rubble. "He has to be here!" a soldier cried. "A suckling pig!" another cursed. "Come here, child," they called Tommen. "Come here, little cub. Your mother has sent us! She is crying and wants to see you!"

"She isn't, is she... uncle?" Tommen said to him, and Jaime instantly reacted with the other word. "Son," he said, "you know your mother. Does that sound like something she would do?"

"No," said Tommen, "not at all."

"Hang on to my back, and don't touch the wall," Jaime said and started a climb, a bag made of table cloth on his chest, as another protective layer between him and the hot wall, his son on his back. The advance was lengthy and painful. He felt a smell of cloth burning. The bag was about to catch fire, and its edges were getting slowly singed. He looked up and he thought he could see the end. Not close, not far. He arched slightly backwards so that the bundle in front did not touch the wall any longer. It wouldn't do to turn the White Book of the Kingsguard into ashes even if the thought of the wildfire melting the glass candle into nothingness loomed in his mind as a most pleasant possibility.

One and two. A hole and then another.

And two more steps to go.

He climbed and all the muscles in his body hurt, the burden on them much heavier than they were used to, and more unequally divided than the knight's armour.

At the top, he thought he could see the light. He scrambled over the edge, bag first, Tommen next, over his father's head, Jaime last, panting. He realised that the bandages on his arms and feet were also scorched but his skin was mercifully fine, even if during a part of the climb it felt like his flesh had been burning and re-growing again as he laboured slowly to get them up. He dismissed the stupid thought. It was impossible.

The wall was just not as hot as he first thought.

Just like the light he thought he saw was not a light.

They ended up in a long rectangular room without windows, or doors. Neatly ordered jars with wildfire, pulsating with warmth, stood all along its high walls, emanating an unnatural green light, greener than Jaime's and Cersei's eyes. The only way to the hall of the accursed fire was seemingly the climb they just took.

Jaime started searching for a secret passage out. When Tyrion killed their father, he had spent several nights immersed in the bowels of the Red Keep, sometimes walking on all fours, looking for his brother, or Varys. By the end of that quest he understood there was a secret passage out of any room, as well as holes and shafts through which a spy could overhear the conversation of others. Ever since he had wondered how many more people knew about him and Cersei for years and would not tell. Varys first of all, probably Littlefinger and possibly many more. The golden twins could have been sentenced to die for treason and fornication years ago. And all that time they were arrogant enough to believe they were so smart and so accomplished at hiding.

Jaime explained to Tommen what to look for, and the boy seemed happy to help. His green eyes glimmered with life and eagerness for adventure as he explored the walls between the jars with utmost care. Until they heard furious voices at the bottom of the vertical stairway in the hot wall that brought them to relative safety.

Tommen froze in fear and covered his ears to block all sound, just at the moment when Jaime exclaimed. "Here, Tommen!"

The passage leading away was less than a shaft for air, smaller than the side branches of the sewers in the poor parts of the city. Even Tommen would have to squeeze and stoop to pass through, and Jaime would have to crawl on his stomach like a lizard to move forward inch by inch. The opening was behind three jars of wildfire stored on top of one another, but there was enough space for a child, or a thin man to move in behind them without touching them and risk breaking all seven hells loose. The opening was small and vaguely masked by two smaller stones. Any other courtier or soldier would see it as pointless hollow in the wall, a crevice leading nowhere.

Jaime helped Tommen shed his useless kingly garments, and encouraged him to get in on his own, between the loose stones, only in black and yellow tunic and light coloured boy breeches. The boy passed behind the jars smoothly as the breeze. Jaime gave him the White Book first, and than the burning candle, wrapped in the bag of cloth.

Father's case was more difficult than the son's. He wore only a coarse tunic of a prisoner, or perhaps of a penitent of the Faith, too large and shapeless. Even without it, he was by no means a small man. He didn't have any small clothes under it. And where that came handy when he was holding Brienne in his arms, being naked in front of his son filled Jaime with bigger shame than his suspicions and mad urges in the loneliness of the black cells. He removed the tunic, took what he could savage from the singed bandages he wore around his limbs and wrapped them tightly around his behind and his manhood in an irregular pattern. He looked at himself and laughed. If he wore a cloak of feathers above his shoulders, and if his skin had been darker, he would be dressed in the fashion of the Summer Isles, for all he knew.

Above all, he hoped he was thin enough to squeeze behind the jars.

There was one thing left to do in case that he was not.

"Tommen," he said, "start moving forward, slowly. Don't wait for me. Leave the book and the candle behind you, some five steps away from the entrance. I will take those."

"I will be right after you," he lied for he didn't know that, he only hoped that he would not be blown to pieces before he could save his son.

"I will do as you say," Tommen said.

When Jaime was satisfied that his son was far enough from immediate danger, he pressed his barren chest to the wall and squeezed himself carefully behind the jars, imagining he was thinner than a new leaf on an oak tree in spring.

The wildfire pulsated at his back, but he refused to think about it as he eased himself slowly off the ground and into the tunnel, some three feet above the floor.

The buggering jars did not move. They had more luck than Jaime deserved.

When he crawled several inches inside the passage, he heard a voice screaming in agony, calling for his mother, who must have been dead for many years, and a whore where Jaime was concerned. The whoresons came to kill his son, a young boy. They deserved whatever was happening to them.

Jaime looked at his stump in wonder, thinking that maybe, maybe, the wall of the stairway that saved them was too hot after all.

"Father," Tommen called him quietly and Jaime's chest bathed in simple delight. "Are you coming?"

"I'm right behind you, son," the father said cheerfully, tightening a strap of singed cloth around his loin. Amazed at his own achievement, glad they were unharmed, Jaime continued crawling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next update may be later than usual


	27. A Night-time Parley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where a septa questions the meaning of life

**Sandor**

Walking down the Street of Silk, Sandor's inside was churning, acid like milk gone sour in the heat of the long summer.

He was on his way back for the bloody reading, more on edge than when he left the Elder Brother. They hadn't done it in awhile. He had already glimpsed a parchment with the flowery title _Rhaegar_ on top of it in the early morning hours before Cersei's trial, resting in calloused hands of Mance Rayder, thickly populated with letters resembling an army of minuscule black flies. How the wildling could write verses in earnest and remain a killer on all other counts was hard to comprehend. And by the quantity of ink wasted, Rhaegar would have to say quite a bit. Knowing Mance and the story, it would be words most unimaginable and humiliating in the deformed mouth of the former king's dog.

 _And after the reading, what?_ that was the worst of it, Sandor knew. Drinking was not appealing. It was getting too much like Gregor and his milk of the poppy with the passing of time. Sandor knew the wine would kill him, but until his last brush with death on the Trident he didn't find in him to care. And now, now, now... he uncovered that he did not know. The sickness in his soul ran too deep to be numbered and understood.

 _A dragon prince,_ he snorted in his thoughts. _The wolf girl brought him his death. We might have that in common, one day._ But admitting such a thing would mean confessing that not all the tales were lies. And on that path lay a peril greater than a thousand swords.

Of losing himself.

The winesink at the end of the street, almost at the Mud Gate, was bursting with the Golden Company sellswords, gambling. The Hound's instincts rejoiced at the sight of them. When he deserted Joffrey, for a few days he entertained the thought of crossing the narrow sea and enlisting with the company. Until he recalled the lessons of his maester in Clegane Keep; they sided with the Blackfyre rebellion. And the Blackfyres were still Targaryen bastards. No Targaryen supporter, bastard or not, would take in the man whose brother raped Rhaegar's wife and butchered his children. Except that one child had miraculously survived, if one trusted Varys.

Sandor Clegane didn't.

As if the sellswords could sense his thirst for a good fight, a better armoured one among them called out to him: "You, there! We are hiring new hands. Are you in need of employment?"

"Already have one," the Hound rasped as peacefully as he could, having second thoughts about his initial impulses. "With the Faith." It was a truth, of a kind. The Elder Brother did swear monk's vows, and Sandor had been moved to protect him ever since he knew the man. Just like the little bird, there were people in the world who needed protection from themselves. And he discovered that service to be much more pleasing than walking two steps after or before spoiled crown princes and boy bastard kings.

The earth moved under his feet then, and he hadn't been drinking since... Well.. He'd rather forget. The ground was hollow where it should not be, all sand, and pores, and mud. _An entrance to a sewer,_ he realized.

The sellsword didn't give up on him. "Hey, His Grace King Aegon VI will pay you better than the Seven ever will. Weren't you the one fighting the dead evil spirit of Gregor Clegane today in the fields before the Dragon Gate?"

"Makes no matter," the Hound said, "find someone else. I don't much care for serving any king." It was a wrong thing to say, but the little patience he had for conversation started running thin.

A dirty tangled golden curl as only one man could have protruded from the soil under his feet when the offended sellsword launched himself at the Hound, naked steel in his pathetic hands. Sandor Clegane managed to step on the blond head with his boot, hoping it was strong enough to push the lion down, but not to break his neck. He would have to check later.

Opening the fool who attacked him from his neck to the bowels was everything he needed at that moment. Until he remembered Sansa, and a dreadful desire to go reading grew heavy on his soul.

 _A blood lust for words,_ Sandor Clegane gave a barking laugh at himself and at the fresh body at his huge feet.

 _She took a sword this morning to defend me,_ he reconstructed the moment in bewilderment after the fight, too occupied with Gregor to take full note of it at the time. _Not that she would know how, but she still tried._

Fellow sellswords removed their fallen comrade and patted Sandor on his back, the enmity forgotten after a challenge of equals where blood was spilled. The Hound bent to put his greatsword back into the scabbard he normally carried on his large back, much slower than he normally would. He grumbled indistinctly to the yellow sand, yellower than the field of tall grass depicted on the sigil he never held in much esteem, but which was his nonetheless.

"Wait there!" he commanded briskly, in hope he would not be taken lightly.

With that he left Jaime with the intention to return for him later, when the soldiers would be too drunk to fight, and walked back to the fisherman's house he almost started to consider his home.

**Septa Lemore**

Septa Lemore didn't dream of seeing the Elder Brother's naked chest when she ran, swifter than a wolverine, to the place where he chose to dwell in King's Landing. The sight of the full extent of damage she only glimpsed when she treated him in front of the Dragon Gate felt like salt being poured on an old wound of her own, reopened many times under the bright stars of the Old Valyria, in nights of peaceful solitude.

Those were other stars than those bathing Westeros in their celestial light, but equally indifferent to the suffering of the living. _Let it all go, Lemore,_ she ordered herself. It would never do to run after an illusion. Her life was different now. She was of a respectable age and the wild years of her youth were comfortably forgotten. Lives ended, sooner or later, and so did the affections that followed them.

There was no eternity.

Despite her dark thoughts, she found herself seated high up on the wall again, next to the monk much taller than herself, observing the mummers' play, and she was so very pleased although he ignored her at first. The sun set behind the dark blue clouds, bringing heavy autumn rain, tomorrow, or in a few days, they would see soon enough.

"You know your duty well, Septa Lemore," the Elder Brother gestured in a friendly curious manner at the bandage he wore. "I wouldn't do it better myself, and especially not in haste."

"It's nothing," she said, distracted. She was not supposed to listen to his voice and imagine things in her life had gone differently.

"Oh, but it is," he insisted. "I would like to thank you."

"Shhh! Listen!" she said not to hear his voice. "A tale can do us all good after today."

But the scene below made her even sadder than the confusion in her mind ever did. The only good thing was that Tyene didn't know where she went. The High Septon called for a council of the Faith, or more likely, of his loyal servants. Oberyn's daughter, loyal to the cause of her house, had to be there.

**Sandor**

"Is that how you wake up?" Mance was angry at Sandor Clegane. "You nearly pushed her to the ground. Be more natural!"

"If I was natural, I would hold a knife to her throat!" Sandor said, and, horrified, noticed Sansa wincing. _Little bird,_ he thought, _see, this dog could never be your kin._ "Is that what you want your public to see?" Sandor spoke as brutally as possible.

In his childhood home he would wake up restless every morning before dawn and run out into the woods and low fields between them to hide from Gregor. The habit stuck also in Casterly Rock until they started mocking him for it. He had beaten up many good men in the training yard because he couldn't sleep properly most of the time.

 _Am I ever going to stop hurting her?_ he thought. He remembered all too well what he told her when drunk, and the worst thing was, he desired to throw all those things in her face all over again, sober. She was now a woman like any other, not an ignorant high lord's get. The desire to insult her over losing her innocence was too strong and overwhelming. She should have remained pure only for him. He should have done it first, before the others had a chance. He hated himself, and he hated his thoughts even more, but they would not abandon his sick mind.

"I'll be a bit less natural," he told Mance to stop thinking. "Maybe it will serve your purpose."

So the next time Rhaegar awoke, he remained half-lying, propped on his thick elbows, staring at the woman he wanted more than anything, through the thin piece of weirwood hiding his ugly face. And hopefully also the envy and the jealousy he had no right to feel.

"When were you going to tell me?" Lyanna asked tenderly, pulling strands of Rhaegar's long hair, and the Hound wondered if _that_ instruction came from the parchment or not.

"Later," he read his lines, "when I would return you to your family, or your betrothed. Maybe never. It would be easier that way."

"You saved me from the king, your father," Lyanna stated the truth of things as Mance imagined they had happened.

"The kingdoms believe I took you and raped you. There is rumour of rebellion in the realm. The last raven I received from the capital spoke of your father and your brother Brandon riding hard to Red Keep to honour an invitation from my father. They are demanding that I give you back. We may know more when we reach Starfall. Arthur and Ashara won't betray me. You will be safe there."

"They still might betray me. It is clear that your father fears the strength of my family so he made a move against the House Stark."

"The Daynes would both die for me or for anyone under my protection."

"Am I under your protection now? You have given your cloak to another," there was a hint of reproach in Lyanna's voice as if Rhaegar could have chosen whom he would wed. _As if Sansa could have done anything but to wed the Imp_ , thought the Hound plunging into his next line with the force he would normally use to kill.

"If I were one of my ancestors, the dragonlords, I would wrap you in a cloak with a three-headed dragon on its back, and fly you over the narrow sea," Rhaegar and the Hound spoke in one voice, as if in a dream.

"So you would kidnap me?" Lyanna asked with a hint of mocking in her voice, soft like summer rain.

"Would that I could. More than anything, I wish that I found you on time. Before my father's men did. Did they...?" the words may have belonged to Rhaegar, but it was Sandor Clegane's pain over a little bird bedded against her will that borrowed the life blood to the dead prince.

"No," Sansa answered sharply, and the Hound wished she was saying the truth. "You came before that came to pass."

"Excellent!" Mance encouraged them. "We are almost done for tonight."

"I wish... I wish..." Lyanna whispered.

The Hound's unforgiving eyesight, trained in more battles than he could remember, saw a wetness on the piece of parchment where Sansa was trying hard to read further. He turned to spying on her face like a predator, but the white wooden mask obscured her features.

The eerie rim of the bloody weirwood tree sap reddening what might have been her tears.

"I wish..." she stumbled on her words again, and a heart of a dog flapped the wings it forgot it had. "I wish I had gone with you willingly before the others had a chance to take me."

Sandor looked at his parchment, not to look at her, but it was empty and untouched as Sansa used to be. Before he abandoned her to her fate and left the capital.

"Not exactly as I wrote it, Sansa," Mance said, "but it is fitting. We'll keep it that way. Well done!"

**Septa Lemore**

"Prince Rhaegar would have told Lady Lyanna a bit more about his life by the time they reached Dorne," the Elder Brother said from the wall to the players and the singer below. "About the real life of the royal heir, much less glamorous than the tourneys and the feasts. That's how I always imagined it since I started listening to your story. I never supposed that he would be so embarrassed about everything that he and his father did, that he wouldn't even dare revealing himself to her. An interesting interpretation, Mance."

Up on the city wall, Septa Lemore stole a look at the Elder Brother, puzzled about his comment and the studious way he'd been watching the mummers' farce. Maybe she didn't have all the answers as she believed. Maybe something was escaping her. Or him. She flushed a daring smile she didn't allow herself in ages to a monk towering above her, enjoying the look of confusion painting itself over the wrinkles on his dry battered face, the same expression she had worn before the latest reading of the play.

Words she had never heard in Essos came unbidden to her mind, although all the people who would speak them to her in the past, had died.

_Winter is coming._

In an age where dragons hatched, the white walkers woke, and butchered infants came back to life, anything was possible.

**Sansa**

The Hound found Sansa hiding next to the hearth, and unsuccessfully at that.

"Come," he said, not knowing where he stole the necessary calm. "It is not dark yet. Let's go for a walk."

She thought he was mocking her so she was surprised when he stressed his point. "If we walk, I won't have time to go drinking and remember my usual courtesies towards you, those of a boar. Dogs are more tolerable."

She laughed and pressed her hand on her mouth to choke it. He gave her a sharp look, but then he let go. Hopefully she was fast enough for him to believe he only imagined her laughing. She feared he would not like her to laugh at him. Even if she had no intention to mock him, and he was just being funny.

She should have refused him because the hour of the owl would not wait, and she promised Mance she would go with him to see Daenerys Stormborn. Yet somehow they started walking, Sansa's legs moving away on their own volition. They didn't go very far. She enjoyed the long strides they made together, taking them out of the city through the Mud Gate.

The guards made no question of a large man going out in private with a woman. They ended up on the brink of Blackwater Rush, kissed by the sea in the distance to their left, no wall between them and the blue of the waters getting dark. The water was unfriendly, unlike the stream not too far from the Trident she populated with pebbles when the long summer finished its reign. The protracted damp evening of King's Landing no longer belonged to it. It was getting cold, but they did not notice it, carrying the warmth within them, one they didn't yet discover in the riverlands.

She wondered if he knew that her last words in the mummer's play were meant for him. He must have known. Or he would not come after her. Or he would come after her no matter what. This way, or that way, he would always return to her. As she suspected she might do the same for him.

Sansa sighed and looked away from her companion.

He didn't seem to see her at all, squatting all of a sudden, just like he did after the Hand's Tourney when he told her the truth about his scars.

"Their bodies were strewn all over this place," he said, gazing all around them. "They were dying. They were _burning._ I led the sortie three times and then I couldn't do it. I couldn't. It was the first time, like that. I still don't know why I went to your chamber. To hide, probably. I had no plans with you. I had no plans for myself. None at all."

Sansa moved to stand behind him and hugged his large head, pressing it to her stomach, something she never dared to do before.

"Sansa," he rasped, "I don't know what this is. Buggering ladies and their wishes."

 _It would be easier if I were the woman you believe me to be,_ Sansa thought, _the woman I might have become if Petyr had it his way._

But to her misfortune she was quite unable to explain to the impossible man she was holding in a language he would understand that she simply didn't know how to give him what he sought.

The sight of Tyrion's arousal on their wedding night, the slobbering kisses and the non-fatherly explorations of her body she endured from Petyr in the Vale, or Miranda Royce's stories of her many lovers, none of it prepared Sansa for wanting to bed a man. And if she tried to tell him, he would probably not believe a single word, making the matters between them more charged with all the things said and unsaid than they already were.

She hated as much as she adored her newly discovered ability to sense his desires.

So she only asked: "Is it... is it a bad thing? This? Us?"

Sansa noticed, or felt, a softening in his demeanour, inviting, weak, a crack in the armour wrought by fire on once living skin. Next thing she knew, she was kneeling against him, brushing the scarred part of his jaw with her lips. Until he took her in his arms, and showed her, again, in the twilight, how it was to be well kissed by a man, and to long for it as soon as he would be gone.

"I should go now," he said after a time with a new something in his ruined voice, looking at the rising moon as if he was trying to discern what hour it was. "I hope to find you resting when I return."

She didn't know what that meant, and she had to go as well to descend the city walls with Mance. But the unspoken promise in his words walked with her all the time when they headed back.

xxxxx

"No," Sansa said staring down the city wall near the Iron Gate, "we're not taking this way."

She walked with Mance for almost an hour until the place he deemed fit to scramble down the wall. Her sister's direwolf howled restlessly at her feet. "Nymeria will not make it, and neither will I."

"Come," she told him, finding courage.

And just like it was with her and Sandor, the guards did not care for a couple, or a large animal, leaving the city in the dead of the night.

The walk alongside the Blackwater Bay was even more tenuous than through the city streets for the path was a ruin of mud and water, and Sansa had to lift her skirts up high to keep on going. It was only good that the guards of Daenerys Stormborn were more vigilant than Aegon's: they caught them well before they could approach the largest ship of her fleet any closer.

"A pretty little thing," one of them told Sansa who considered that maybe she should not have accompanied the singer. _A trusting fool you will remain,_ she told herself, and she could see Petyr laughing at her. _A pawn._

But the wolf and the wildling growled at the guard who stepped back, uncertain.

"Take me to Daenerys Stormborn," Mance said with his battle voice. "I am a messenger from her nephew, Aegon, or maybe an assassin he had sent to murder her. Either way I have important news for her."

"You would be the fifth messenger and the third assassin, depending on who's doing the count," the sellsword jested. "The queen will not receive you. The rest of you sorry lot is in chains under the deck of the flagship."

"In sign of good will," Sansa said, "I offer myself as a hostage to the queen. My name is Sansa Stark and I am the last living heir of the House Stark. Her Grace could use me to secure the North for her cause."

"We also have a wife of late Lord Stark, her mellow-voiced singer, and her false priest, chained with the assassins," the sellsword scratched his head. "The quantity of visitors has been high of late. I'll ask the Lord Commander where to put you."

They never found out who the Lord Commander was because the most beautiful woman Sansa has ever seen walked out before them from the belly of the big ship, unguarded, in a thin silvery night gown floating in the air of the night. Her hair was of brighter silver than her dress, and the darkness in her eyes reminded Sansa of another pair of eyes in the flickering light of the torches from the fleet. But the remembrance escaped her and she could not match the other eyes with a face or even less a name.

"Your Grace," Sansa went to her knees thinking it could not hurt to do so with kings, queens, or pretenders alike.

Mance, for his part, remained standing, and Sansa wondered if he would ever bow to anyone. Nymeria howled at the moon, fully risen by the hour of the owl, and the Silver Queen smiled.

"A direwolf," she said, knowingly. And than to Mance, coldly. "State your errand, _King-_ beyond-the-Wall?"

Instead of speaking, the wildling looked defiantly at the guards, still encircling them.

"Bring the other prisoners!" the queen commanded them. "The one who claims to be Lady Stark, and the one that the so-called lady styles the Kingslayer's Whore. Leave the rest for the time being."

"My queen," the guard who leered at Sansa tried to say, but a gaze from Daenerys' darkened eyes left him mutilated and scurrying to obey.

"Speak now! What do you want?" Daenerys commanded Mance when the guards left. She would not take it kindly if he didn't comply, Sansa was certain. A flutter of wings could be overheard above the dense night clouds and she wondered if that was where her dragon, or dragons, slept, high up in the air. Rumours in the city differed on whether Rhaegar's sister had brought only one, or five living dragons with her from over the water. Daenerys did not come out to meet them as alone as she appeared to be.

"I've come to offer you to take you to Aegon. I strongly believe you should talk to him in person, without his councillors, or yours, nearby. You should see him before you make your move, and he you. Or you might regret it, one day," Mance hurried to supply an answer.

"You would do me a service," Daenerys said rearranging her gown in a quaint gesture of a fragile girl. "And what favour would you ask of me in exchange? A lock of my hair?"

"I wished myself a bard before they called me king," Mance said with humility, in contrast with his posture of a tall sentinel tree of the north, not young, not old, unbent, unbound, unbroken. _A man from farther North than North who can best be described by the words belonging to a great house from as far south as the lands of Westeros go_ , Sansa mused.

"I would ask both of you and of Aegon, after your conversation, if it pleases you, to honour my insignificant services, such as they might prove to you, by attending a mummers' show I intend to present in the capital a fortnight hence. A small favour, not worthy of a single hair from your precious head, more lovely than that of any woman I have had the pleasure to look upon in my not so short a life."

Daenerys hesitated, seemingly flattered, and Sansa, still on her knees, dared to look up. Only to notice two hooded figures walking among the guards towards the queen. Lady Brienne, on the other hand, was being carried to her presence on a litter covered in foreign silks of blue and green, from a different opening in one of the smaller ships.

A familiar gurgle came from under the hood from Sansa's right. She chose to ignore it and went to the Lady Brienne instead. A black flower blossomed over her pale wide forehead where something heavy must have hit her. The eyes of the lady knight were closed. "My lady," she called her. When Sansa's brother Bran fell from the tower of the First Men in Winterfell, Maester Luwyn advised all who loved him to talk to him because he might be able to hear them, and wake. Sansa barely knew Brienne but she still felt she should at least try. "Gendry was most worried about you. He went looking for you. I am glad to have found you. I hope that on the inside you are…unharmed."

"My lady," Sansa realised that Daenerys suddenly addressed her. "Lady Catelyn Stark brought me this woman she claims to be the Kingslayer's Whore. She says that the Kingslayer had sent her to assassinate me. Above all she insists that through her I can capture the Kingslayer himself and make him pay for stabbing my father in his back when he was sworn to protect him."

"Lady Catelyn Stark?" Sansa said with sudden anger. "Who would that be? This woman here? Have you seen her face?"

She walked back to the cruel person claiming to be her mother and pulled her cowl down by force.

"My mother was beautiful and merciful even in her losses," Sansa said, disregarding the pained look in once blue eyes of a dark shadow of a woman who birthed her. "This, if this is a woman still, has somehow kept the memories of my lady mother, and none of her kind soul."

Daenerys paled in shock and her dark eyes narrowed at the sight of the dead skin of the Lady Stoneheart, and the deep gash across her throat. "I have seen a creature like this, once, not long ago. I should have suspected…" she said. "What do you say, _King-_ beyond-the-Wall? Will the Kingslayer come forward to offer his life in exchange for the life of his whore?"

"Her name is Lady Brienne of Tarth," Sansa had to say. "She is nobody's whore. She plays the role of the Lady Ashara Dayne in our show."

"Your show?" the Dragon Queen asked, mildly surprised. "What role are you playing?"

"My Aunt Lyanna's," Sansa replied. "I have none of her strength or her courage, but I nevertheless find her life to be worthy of a song."

"I cannot speak for the Kingslayer. You would have to ask him. He also has a role in my play," Mance added. "Which brings me to another favour I would have to ask of you, Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of Aerys II. Not to judge any of my players until all the mummery is over."

"You ask for much," Daenerys said, and first a tumult, and than a majestic screech emphasised her words from the blackness of the clouded sky above. "One word from my mouth, and all of you will _burn_ to pay for your insolence. Bend to Daenerys Stormborn, First of Her Name, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and Mother of Dragons!"

"I only do what I must," Mance said and remained standing. "As will you, of that I have no doubt."

The silence was uneasy and empty, the night even colder.

"An assassin would have attempted to strike at me by now," Daenerys said thoughtfully.

"Or I am a very good liar," the wildling said, unflinching. "Burn me, and you will never know. It is a precious gift these days, to make sure that a man burns in his death. You would make sure that I die and never become a wight serving the real enemies of the realm of men. And for that, Daenerys Stormborn, I thank you."

The priest accompanying Sansa's mother thought of the moment opportune to speak and interpret the commands of his lady. "Her ladyship insists that her daughter is mistaken in her views. They married her to a Lannister so she is now a traitor to her own house."

Sansa laughed bitterly and refused to look at her would be mother and her gaunt companion. "Ser Jaime Lannister was a captive of my mother and my brother Robb for all I know in the time that I was made to share a marriage bed with his little brother, Lord Tyrion," she said. "This Lady Stoneheart here should recall more of Ser Jaime as he truly was than I can. I barely knew him when I was a girl of eleven. I have no particular love for him, but I know by the confession of his cousin Ser Daven that he still did order the men under his command to spare me and save me from the malice of another man who would have only used me for his ends. And that other man, _that man_ , claimed to be a friend of my mother, once. With such friends, I know not which one of us is a traitor to the House Stark, my mother or I."

The gurgle of protests from Lady Stoneheart's turned louder, and Sansa wondered if black blood would drip from her dead mother's throat if she had a blade and the bravery to pierce it with hard steel.

"Sansa," the priest said, "your mother begs you to remember your father and the loyalty you owe him."

Behind Sansa's eyes, her Lord Father's head rolled one more time down the imposing steps of the Great Sept of Baelor. Wounded beyond measure by the force of her memory, she covered her ears with her hands to mute the thudding sound of it. She would be able to hear it for the rest of her life. Warm living sobs wrenched her for the third time since she woke up that morning. _Will there ever be a time for anything more than tears?_ she wondered.

"Enough," Danerys said, the woman she pretended to be ceding a place fully to the queen. Dangerous and armoured in her scarce words, well protected by the invisible wings in the sky.

"The gods work in your favour, Mance Rayder," Daenerys addressed the surprised wildling by his name. "I was in Harrenhal too. I know of your cloak. And I know what it is to seek justice. Or revenge."

"Take the Kingslayer's Whore with you, for now," the Dragon Queen told him, "and look for me at the Mud Gate tomorrow at noon."

With that, she was gone.

The guards dragged Lady Stoneheart and the priest away. Sansa and Mance were left alone with the litter, lucky that Nymeria was with them to help pull it back to the city walls. Soon a merry party, a tall dark haired man supporting a younger blond one who completely passed out from drinking and collided with some tree, a good looking red headed wench, and an oversized grey dog, were all safely back between the city walls.

Aegon's guards being none the wiser of what had transpired and of what it could mean for their king.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to everyone who left a kudos or a comment on this story.


	28. Prowling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the characters successfully prowl around King's Landing

**Sandor**

Getting the Kingslayer and his bastard out of the hole in the ground proved way easier than he expected. The city turned silent before time, maybe due to the black menace boosting a coat of sharp glittery scales, hovering over the Blackwater Bay, or there was no wine left with the change of the seasons. Sandor Clegane was glad for it either way.

"Come," he told the nearly tamed lion, who followed without words, clutching to his chest an enormous book and a black candle, burning. The flame exhaled a peculiar dark purple vapour, and it emitted no heat as far as the Hound could tell, as if it were not made of fire at all. He still kept a bit away from it, on an impulse.

Tommen, unlike his father, was all for talking.

"You betrayed Joffrey," he said in an accusatory tone he must have very recently acquired from Cersei in the stone cage for wild animals they called the Red Keep. "Won't you give us up to the new king to earn riches and favours?"

"The new king is no hair of my arse," the Hound bothered to answer the boy, as all three of them hurried down the empty paved streets. The only sound to be heard came from Sandor's boots  for his charges emerged from the soil barefoot like on each of their name days. "And don't think I betrayed Joff, not truly. I just ran away from everything like a scared dog who has had enough."

"Dogs kill kittens," Tommen observed, not entirely wrong in his assumptions; twisting Joffrey's neck did occasionally cross Sandor's darkened mind. His heart was at peace when he learned that someone else had effectively seen to that.

"And the men with the big black dragon on their golden armour will kill us all if you don't shut up," Sandor said, fed up with making conversation.

It worked. Sometimes he regretted his words didn't have that same effect on Sansa as before. It used to be so easy to scare her that it almost gave him joy, just like she had suspected. But that night he was determined to try another approach.

 _No longer a girl,_ he pondered without anger. _I will see what kind of woman others have made of you, little bird._

He would get a good measure of her, all of her, and see if she would refuse him or welcome him closing the distance. He didn't want to dwell too much on which possibility terrified him more. He would uncover her, inch by inch, reveal what others have had before him. Since he had left her after their walk to the Mud Gate that night, he found that he didn't care what other men there were, when, or how many. It was up to him to see that there wouldn't be any more. If she would let him.

His resolve grew great as the mountains. It used to occur the same way during the countless long evenings of wine induced dreams, in his own cell in the Red Keep, the place someone once ventured to call a room, where he plotted and planned on whisking her away from the capital, away from his masters. To take her for himself, a selfish, starved dog. The one who would never share a bone.

And every time he would end up looking at his ugly face in the mirror some merciful bastard had put in his prison, until the night he shattered it with his fists, and covered it in a spare white cloak, not to remind him of the truths he sometimes wanted to ignore.

But never to forget.

It would not do to forget the truth, unpleasant as it surely was. It was what the gods have made him, to their glory, or their shame. And everyone was welcome to take a good long look.

At what life could do to you if you were not careful enough.

There was nowhere to go but back to the fisherfolk who would shut themselves on the floor above, and never put their noses out at night, and for that, too, the Hound was grateful. The only one who could see Jaime and Tommen were the bloody ravens, and so far the birds still could not talk, despite the dead dragons and the sleeping white walkers resurrecting to life.

"The accommodation lacks in comfort," he cynically told Jaime when he brought them in. "But I'd say that it still leaves the luxury of the black cells far behind."

"Thank you," the Kingslayer said, slumping to the floor as soon as they were out of the streets and over the looming stone doorstep, where Sandor had the misfortune to overhear the little bird wishing he would ride very far away from her, only to bring her a flower. The Seven Kingdoms were no longer the same in his grey eyes. They were a different land entirely. One with possibilities.

Tommen gazed around with improper curiosity only a child would be unable to hide.

"It smells on dog," the boy said.

The Hound chuckled thinking of Nymeria. "Don't tell it to the real dog when she gets back. She might not take it kindly."

"There is a puppy?" Tommen was happier than ever. "Mother never let me keep one…"

"Tommen," the Kingslayer finally rediscovered his natural grace in speaking, and not a moment too late, for Sandor's patience with children was running dangerously thin. "There is a pallet in that corner. You should sleep now. Please."

"I will, father," the boy said with such affection in his voice and obediently laid down with such incredible speed that the Hound started to envy the father lion. It was another of the simple things a mere dog would most likely never experience. Yet the buggering sister fucker who never had the guts to tell his children the truth had just got to enjoy the gift of fatherhood.

The Hound regretted his thoughts when Jaime gave him a pained look. The Kingslayer was not well.

"Maybe you should put it down," Sandor suggested, pointing at the odd candle. "What is it, anyway?"

"I wish I knew," Jaime said. "But it didn't seem prudent to leave it where it was, so I thought I had best take it with me."

The fire had not been kindled in the hearth that evening, the Hound noticed, so he moved the blocks of wood and dry cracking branches from it, clearing some space in its sooty interior.

"Here," he told the Kingslayer who relinquished his dark burden in the fireplace, and sat on the floor in front of it, the large book falling open on his knees. Jaime looked up to the Hound behind him, reminded of something, a consideration of importance judging by the green urgency of his questioning glare.

"The shield," he said. "Brienne's. You asked about it too. Look. Tommen recognised it in the dungeons."

The Hound stared wordlessly at a rather conspicuous entry in what had to be the White Book of the Kingsguard, depicting the life and brave deeds of the legendary Lord Commander in the times of King Aegon V, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his coat of arms.

A falling star on a sunset field, and a single tree.

The image he remembered hanging on the tapestry in the Clegane Keep, one of the few possessions left over from the times of his grandfather. Probably ruined by Gregor since Sandor ran away from the place. And that action of Gregor would have probably been for the best. Why their grandfather should cherish a symbol of a long time dead knight of old was beyond Sandor Clegane's capacity of comprehension. Maybe the old man had been more sentimental than the Hound had ever thought. It was plain stupid, not to mention presumptuous to keep such a token where it did not belong, in the seat of a minor bannerman of the House Lannister. Should Lord Tywin have recognised it, it wouldn't have gone well for the Cleganes. There would be no Raynes of Castamere to sing about their fate. Only ruined walls and bodies of all the castle folk put to sword, or worse, would speak of what words could not.

You either knew how to use your sword, or you died by it, sooner rather than later. There was little else.

Another entry on the page, done in elaborate ornamental calligraphy, flashed bright in front of a pair of grey eyes, slowly getting stormy like all seven hells. " _Black of hair, seven feet tall…"_

The height was his own, and Gregor had surpassed it. Very few people in Westeros could match it, maybe one of them bloody northerners who followed Lord Stark around in Winterfell in the unique visit that Sandor was forced to pay to that frozen middle of nowhere. He heard there were giants north of the Wall, but then again, he also heard they were in relation to man what a wild aurochs was to a manse goat. Not exactly one and the same.

It was a silly thought and Sandor disregarded it with all his might. _The Kingsguard father no children,_ the much repeated statement fleeted over his mind, but only one look at Jaime crumpled in front of him was enough to send that notion to a pile of other obvious lies he had heard in his life where it clearly belonged.

"We can't stay here," Jaime said, and the Hound had to agree.

"No," he told him truly, "but we'll think of something by the morning. The bloody singer and the monk should show up any time, and they both have bigger brains than I."

"Or I," the Kingslayer said bitterly, waving his non-existent hand. "I used to be much more eloquent with smith-wrought means of persuasion."

"I'm out of spare clothing of the faith," the Hound said to halt the self-pity of his former liege lord, gesturing at Jaime's lack of decency. _Pity will lead you nowhere,_ he thought, moreover, he knew, from his own experience. Pity was not what the Hound wanted, and neither did Jaime, whether he was yet aware of it or not. Sandor Clegane went to look around, digging through everyone's possessions, showing no respect.

"Here," he sneered, "we are all mummers now. I don't think that the others will mind. Or not very much."

Soon Jaime was dressed in Lord Blackwood's tunic featuring a giant tree, his tired body turning every bit as stiff as a dead white tree might have felt, if it had any feelings to start with. Almost falling apart from exhaustion. Sandor had seen men looking like that after surviving long and nasty battles.

"Get some sleep, Kingslayer," Sandor chased him away like a bugger he was, and only when he succeeded in his efforts, the Hound realised the most important flaw in his plans. He wanted to see Sansa.

But Sansa was not there.

**Aegon**

Many years later, after the Long Night, Aegon would still not be able to explain why he summoned Varys in the middle of the night at the beginning of autumn, where none of his other councillors could see him. Not even the straightforward Jon Connington who believed so fervently that Aegon was Rhaegar's son: the noble man fierce in his honour who had become Aegon's father in almost everything. Yet a terrible doubt was gnawing at the young king, and the Iron Throat felt less his own and more someone else's with every second he dared to seat on it. As a consequence, he avoided it, prowling around it in great circles while Ned Dayne and Robert Arryn guarded the entrance to the throne room.

It would dawn in a couple of hours.

Dawn.

Ser Arthur Dayne's sword was the only thing that felt like Aegon's own, as if a voice from the grave whispered to him that single truth.

Then again, Jon taught him not to believe in prophecies and premonitions. His father did, and it led him to his death. Rhaegar, like his father before him, believed in the prophecy of the prince that was promised who would issue from the male line of Aerys II.

 _Maybe Viserys had children before the horse riding barbarian killed him,_ Aegon would never forget the rumours in Essos concerning his uncle's demise. While his aunt stood by and watched. _And that is the woman I am supposed to marry._ A woman barely older than a girl who already buried two husbands and a brother. It was rumoured she was more beautiful than sin and that she took as many lovers as she could handle, men and women both. Aegon shivered, uneasily, when Varys finally entered, clad in a pale night gown, a dark blue night cloak and a pair of slippers ladies could wear at court.

"Your Grace," he said softly, "you have an important counsel to ask for, no doubt, to disturb your faithful servant in his night rest."

"Forgive me, Lord Varys," Aegon said and meant it, certain of one other thing apart of his love for his new sword. The man in front of him, for much that some would not consider a eunuch to be a man, had once saved his life, smuggling him out of the capital. "But there is a question I can ask only of you in greatest secrecy."

Varys looked around him and nearly under the throne itself. "Great secrecy," he parroted in a voice betraying no human emotion at all. "A most unusual demand in the friendly and loyal surroundings we are now all experiencing in the Red Keep after the long years of the Usurper's undeserved rule."

Aegon was not stupid and he understood. Even in the middle of the night, someone could be listening.

"Walk with me," he said. "The autumn air is sweet in the streets of King's Landing. I would breathe it at night."

Varys obeyed, and Dayne and Arryn followed. They didn't go far, barely a few streets in the direction of the Iron Gate, a peaceful part of the city where everyone seemed fast asleep.

Aegon sat on one of the stony steps surrounding a well in the middle of a small square, a buzzing place in daytime, where women would soon come to carry away the water. There was no much time left before the all powerful sun would wake up the city, its inhabitants and the beasts, stray and domesticated alike. So he asked, more bluntly than he intended.

"Varys, am I really my father's son?"

"As much as I am a son of my own father, I swear on that, Your Grace," Varys said with seriousness that further kindled the fears of the contrary in Aegon's heart.

"Sometimes," he stuttered, "I dream of Rhaegar, crying over my dead body. Except that the body is not mine but of a different boy. Then a green dragon rises in the sky, and I know that all will end well."

"Dreams play tricks on us, Your Grace," Varys said quietly. "Don't listen to them or you may lose your mind."

"The curse of the Targaryens, I know, One healthy on one mad in almost every new generation," Aegon said. "And I cannot help but wonder… I've known Septa Lemore since I know myself, and she is Dornish as far as she is willing to admit."

"What are you trying to say, Your Grace?"

"The Dornish are dark of skin, I know," Aegon said. "In Essos the sun shines so strongly that almost everyone is tanned… Yet now we are back in Westeros and the maesters have sent out the white ravens. Autumn is here, and winter will be here soon. We have been here for two months, and Septa Lemore's skin has turned imperceptibly paler, and mine, my own, Lord Varys, has remained as honey coloured as it always was. I wonder…"

"You are nowhere near as dark as Septa Tyene, Your Grace," Robert Arryn dared saying to his new sovereign and almost friend. "She's definitely Dornish, she even speaks like one. I learned to tell all accents of the Seven Kingdoms when I was a little boy at court and my father was the Hand of the Usurper."

"You even wear the Usurpers's name," Aegon commented, smiling."I meant no offence, Robin, it's a good a name as any other. Nonetheless, when it comes to me, I cannot help but wonder…" Aegon said looking at his honey coloured hands in the light of a pale moon, waning sadly behind the tall city walls.

"The intricacies of nature," Varys said sweetly, "the colour of an eye, the shade of skin, the charm of a pretty face, they all come and they go. You are still your father's son, Your Grace. You have my word on that for what it is worth."

"And about my aunt, Varys, what of her? Should I propose her marriage, or war? Or should I marry one of the other ladies on offer? Their number is growing by day," Aegon concluded with resignation, more worried about the answers he received so than before when all he had were questions. That afternoon he had received a raven from Prince Doran Martell, offering him his cousin, Ariana, Doran's daughter and heir, for wife. He had no idea how to respond to that generous offer.

"Let's say that," Varys chose his words carefully, "marrying your aunt would be a long step in the right direction of proving that you are your father's true son and heir. Everyone would see it as honouring a marriage tradition between siblings and close kin of the House Targaryen. But the choice is not yet here to make. I believe that you should talk to Princess Daenerys first."

"Talk! How when she hides on her ship under the wings of her dragons?"

"Maybe I can help!" a deep pleasant voice startled Aegon, climbing up from the direction of the Iron Gate. Dayne and Arryn took a protective stance in front of their King but the uncouth man in dark rags and a light cloak came forward, baring the palms of his hands in sign that he held no weapon. There was a longsword on his back and a lute on his hip, his waist devoid of any other weaponry. Aegon recognised the singer he had let go; well, perhaps he had made a mistake. He could be killed now by a perfect stranger and never know the real answers to his questions.

"Lady Sansa," Lord Varys said to a woman appearing behind, supporting another person with the help of a giant dog. "Well met."

"Well met indeed, Lord Varys," the young woman said calmly as if they were all exchanging pleasantries at court and not standing next to the fountain belonging to the commoners of the city of King's Landing. "Your Grace," she said to Aegon, "Mance Rayder means you no harm. He has come from far north with a song meant for your ears and the ears of your aunt. But for that the two of you should come together, and listen."

"Sweetrobin," she addressed young Robert Arryn, "I am truly glad to see that you are well and almost a knight grown. Has your ailment been bothering you?"

"Not so much in the last days, Alay… I wanted to say, Lady Sansa."

"Sansa, please," she admonished him gently. "We are first cousins."

"Sansa," the boy knight blushed in her presence.

"I took a liberty of recommending to your aunt to meet you before she may decide to scorch this city," the wild looking man said to Aegon then. "I didn't see fit to inform her I yet had to convince you to meet her as well."

"And what of my own messengers?" Aegon said, an unmeasurable wrath slowly taking hold of him. "Have they already been burned?"

"I have not seen them," Mance said with caution, avoiding a direct lie. "But her men mentioned they were in chains under one of the ships while their queen examined her options."

"Their queen," Aegon snorted. "Your words are a carefully boiled poison, bard from the north. Why should I trust you?"

"I am not asking for your trust," Mance said. "I only ask that you come to Mud Gate tomorrow at noon, with a chosen company of men _you_ trust to protect your life, even against a dragon. I will not be present at your talk with your aunt if she comes, as she said she would. I will help that you meet and take my leave. The private matters of the kings are none of my concern."

"Then perhaps I will be in a company of a woman," Aegon said, making everyone's head turn and mouths open. Even Lord Varys showed signs of not understanding, for once, and Aegon's heart danced.

"If you allow me now, my lords, my lady, I should return to the Red Keep before my faithful councillors send out the Golden Company to look for me again. They pillaged some more in the already ruined villages of the war stricken Riverlands the first time I walked away after the phantom of my aunt. I would honestly hate to see it happen again."

"Your intent is noble, Your Grace," Varys turned to flattering. Lady Sansa made a perfect courtesy, and Mance just stood, staring forward as a statue of the Great Titan in Braavos, welcoming the ships to his harbour in his own particular way. By a blast. The way Aegon should perhaps greet his aunt before she decided he was not Rhaegar's son, and had him killed like her husbands and her own brother before him. He knew that he should greet Daenerys with a sword.

Dawn.

**Daenerys**

Daenerys knew she should go back out as soon as the latest of her uninvited guests left, the singer, the lady, and the wolf. For they were not the very last ones.

"Come out!" she called to the unknown and the unseen, not experiencing any fear.

"Daenerys," the man said under the brown cowl, not showing his face, holding forward a rounded wooden shield with a falling star. She could feel Drogon's excitement at it with sheer urgency and she knew beyond doubt that the man was no foe. But that didn't mean that she knew who he was. "I followed my friends here."

"Why if I may ask?"

"I was afraid you would have them harmed."

"So you came along, one man with a shield, among many man at arms at my command, to help your friends?" she asked faking indifference and amusement where she was most intrigued by the man's unexpected courage.

"You are forgetting a lance that was once broken, and a piece of armour of a dead king," he said, humouring her mood, showing his long freshly forged weapon in an unthreatening way and a black breastplate he wore, the decoration on it recalling a sigil that was not his, but hers by right. His words sounded sincere, unlike hers. "If you were in Harrenhal as you told Mance, than you may have noticed me as well, even if I am a far less colourful person than some of my companions."

"The monk who stood against the injustice done to the singer at his failed execution, they called you the Elder Brother" she said, and it all sounded true, but not completely. She repeated to herself that she could not trust this man. Trust was not advisable.

"And most of all, I wanted to see you, Daenerys Targaryen, the new wonder of Westeros, Mother of Dragons," the monk said, "and create my own impression of you."

"Have you done that?" she had to know.

"Most definitely," he said. "A rather high one, so far. But have you more prisoners in need of healing under your decks? I could give you a hand."

"There is a girl who doesn't remember her name," Daenerys said, surprising herself for answering. "She tried to kill me, but I couldn't bring myself to have her executed for that. She is so young. But it was not only that. If she had really tried to kill me, she would have been the first of many assassins who would have succeeded. Something stayed her hand. As I stayed mine, and Drogon's fire, in payment of that debt."

"Is it possible not to remember one's name?" the Elder Brother wondered.

"In her case it is," Daenerys replied. "The leader of my army, they are called the Unsullied, he deems it some witchcraft from across the sea. Or a result of the extreme suffering of body and mind."

"Which explanation do you favour?" the Elder Brother needed to know.

"What do you think?" she responded with a question of her own.

"You believe in the power of human suffering," he said looking deeply in her purple eyes. "Forgive me if I wrong you by saying so."

"You seem to know me well for such a short a time," the Silver Queen said, pleased at the thought that perhaps also in Westeros she could find an ally. Not a trusted one, at first, but an ally at least. "You've heard what I said to your friends. When I am done with them tomorrow, if they don't betray me to my death, I will show you the girl if you still want to see her."

"Thank you," the monk said, bowing simply. "I will hold you to your word."

Noisy and clumsy in his going, contrary to what he might have believed about the prowess of his silent arrival, the Elder Brother returned to the city, with his lance and his shield. Drogon flapped his leathery wings in the sky spreading them towards the sun, thrilled with the coming of the new day. And with something else Daenerys had never yet experienced from her dragon.

 _Green_ , _green, green,_ the black dragon thought only of green, and revelled in the thought giving him joy, or so Daenerys understood him, wondering one more time, as she did every singled day, if his brothers, Rhaegal and Viserion, fared well.

If they were still alive.

**Sansa**

When Sansa and Mance hauled Brienne in the fisherman's house, none of their companions were there. Only two blond haired creatures, a smaller and a larger one, slept peacefully on two pallets in one of the corners. A fresh dread descended on Sansa.

Sandor was not there.

Did he come looking for her? What did he do when he didn't find her? Had he gone drinking? Wild fears swirled in her mind imagining what he could have done in his anger, when Mance solemnly declared. "The gods can be greater than we can picture them to be."

"My Ned Stark still lives!" he exclaimed and Sansa wished greedily he meant her real father and not the Elder Brother. "We met both Aegon and Daenerys," he continued, "and here are the two players who have been lost to me. They have to read soon the next part of my show, the best kept secret."

They laid Lady Brienne to sleep next to Ser Jaime and Tommen. It seemed like an adequate place. "They could be the lord and the lady, and the boy their child. Of some faraway castle in a land that exists only in tales," Sansa imagined aloud. "The sleep knows nothing of the Kingslayer and his whore. But he still would have allowed for you to be killed."

"We all do things we think best, but which bring harm to others," Mance said. "I will look for my back, but I will not hold that against him."

"My father said that is why we needed the laws," Sansa responded with the lessons of her childhood.

"As long as we do not forget that the laws are made and broken by men," said the King Beyond the Wall. "I could not judge another for transgressions I have made myself. I broke almost all the laws in this land yet there are only a few things I truly regret. The laws can change."

"What do you regret, besides… besides skinning the Boltons?" speaking of the horror was difficult for Sansa but she forced the words out. Not embellished and not false.

"I will tell you, Sansa, but not tonight. Tonight this house is empty! Tonight the moon was high! And my errand is almost done! I so have to go out to meet new dawn. Try a song or two. I picked up a rhyme about Daemon Blackfyre and his unrequited love which could come handy for amusing the drunk sellswords of the Golden Company…"

Sansa wouldn't admit it but she was relieved when both Mance and Nymeria were gone, one to caress his lute, and another to howl sadly to the moon, disappearing in earnest behind the Iron Gate. The wolf was distressed to the extreme after their talk to Daenerys. Sansa could not distinguish why, and while she sensed the animal's fear, the reasons for it escaped her.

She stepped out of the door, restless like she rarely was.

She felt him before she had seen him, a shadow among the shadows of the coming morning, black-shaped as when he hid in her bed when the wildfire consumed Blackwater all those years ago. He was roosting with the ravens on the city wall which did not collapse from his weight as he once feared. Or maybe he lost some of it, a man diminished without the dark metal of his old armour.

"I see that you take to seeing older men," he barked without looking at her. "I guess Mance is an improvement after Baelish, no doubt, at least he comes from that vast land of yours. Do his hands on your body remind you of home? Of frozen streams and summer snows? That's how the men of your father called it when I had to go to Winterfell. Summer snow, and it was deeper than anything I have ever seen in the west in what they told me was winter."

Sansa was upset with his words, and with a prickly feeling in the small of her back.

"Come down," she said, unable to fight him when he was so far away. She needed his proximity to receive at least a little bit of guidance on what was going on in his soul.

"You don't want me to," he replied after a while. "I'd do things to you. Things you wouldn't want me to do."

"Let me be the judge of that," she said and raised both her hands up towards him, too late in realising the futility of her gesture. If he took her on her offer, he would crush her down with his body like a broken twig, no matter that she had grown taller than most girls and women she had known.

"Mance asked me to go with him and see Daenerys Targaryen. He wants her to talk to Aegon, and that both she and Aegon watch his show," she tried explaining.

"And the dog was not worthy of being told before you went?" he snorted. "After… After we…."

"Somehow, somehow," she hesitated in baring her reasoning, "it was not the right moment. It rarely is, with you. My… my dead mother was with her, but luckily Daenerys doesn't seem to trust her counsel. And she gave us Lady Brienne as a token of her good will. You must have seen us dragging her in."

"I may have," he admitted, and Sansa concluded he behaved worse than the ladies of the court when he felt hurt. Because he didn't feign it as they mostly did. The Hound could get hurt by her. The sensation flowed through the air and she was never more certain of anything. And he had no right to be angry with her when he didn't tell her either that he would go out for Ser Jaime and Tommen, she realised.

"Come down," she repeated in a deeper voice, softer than a kiss.

He was with her in a second, making her lean to the cold wall where she stood, under the ravens' nest and next to the growing pile of penitent shoes.

He slid both hands under her bodice in a skilled movement, unfastening it swifter than her maids ever did, deft as when he wielded his greatsword on a different kind of battlefield, accessing skin, boldly. He cupped both her breasts and said: "Did the Imp do this to you?"

"No," she managed a reply. _No one ever did,_ she thought. The stone behind her back stopped feeling cold, acquiring an eerie warmth of the walls of Winterfell, heated by the pools of hot water, even in the middle of winter.

"Did Baelish?" he asked again, dark of voice and thought, continuing to explore her figure in slow circling movements, descending to her waist, hands finding their way into her small clothes and further down between her thighs.

"You are lying," he accused her before she could even give her next answer. His words devoid of hatefulness but full of unwavering conviction. "You would not feel this way if no one ever did."

Sansa didn't know how she felt to him or how a maid was supposed to feel when someone touched her there. It was just different than anything that was ever done to her before.

"It makes no matter," he exhaled and got his hands out, embracing her, leaning his flat half ruined forehead on her own smooth one. "It makes no matter who did what to you. I would still want you. And it's driving me more insane with every day that passes."

Her entire body tingling from new sensations, Sansa sneaked her hands around his neck, and took the matters to the known ground. The new kiss was different than any other they gifted each other before, crude and wonderful in its devouring simplicity. She pressed her breasts into him, and it was even better. She couldn't remember how it was possible that she had ever been afraid of him or his mangled face. He seemed to approve of her deeds, yanking her behind and her legs off the ground until they instinctively ended somewhere high up and around his body, helplessly stuck in the mild autumn air.

A cry, such as she has never heard herself utter before, left her lips against her will, hanging between them like a confession.

And then, before she could process it all, he gently lowered her down, still well-placed in his arms.

"Not like this," he said, looking almost _timidly_ around, losing his resolve, exerting all over her a cold controlled look of a man who used to loom next to Joffrey in a blink of one of her Tully blue eyes. "You want presents, and attention. Declarations of love. I cannot give you that."

Sansa could not tell him what she wanted but presents were very much down on her list of silly wishes of late. And his presence quite high on it.

"Stay with me," she murmured. "Don't tell me now what the next day will bring."

It seemed he could live with that last silly wish of hers.

When the party that went searching for the Lady Brienne returned home, they were still hiding in the shadows, immobile, not talking. When Mance came back, Sansa's hands went up, under Sandor's tunic, and they almost didn't see him, lost to the outside world. When the Elder Brother returned, the last one to do so, they shared their final kiss, impervious to the shrill light of the sun shining over the wall and the white blocks of stone it was made of, shedding its merciless glimmer over the land, washing away the promises and ending the prowlings of the night.

In the light, their courage dwindled. In the light, they were only Sandor and Sansa, not Florian and Jonquil, nor Rhaegar and Lyanna.

In the light, it was difficult to pretend.

Whatever they were becoming, it would not be allowed to be.


	29. The Best Kept Secret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Which speaks of Jaime and Cersei, but not only

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that the topic of incest in this chapter doesn't bother you. I see it as an integral part of ASOIAF.

**Brienne**

Brienne opened her eyes to a thickness of blond waves entering them, smelling of burn and of soot, in contrast with their golden colour. The perfumed mass was already filling her nose and tickling her mouth too. She murmured from sudden satisfaction and thoughtlessly stretched her arms to determine that the rest of Jaime's head and body was indeed near her own.

Until through his tangled hair she saw another pair of young green eyes, sparkled with yellow specks, weary and lacking any trust.

Abruptly, she sat up and looked at the boy whose father slid to the ground, not minding that the new surface he continued to sleep on was nowhere near as soft as the previous one.

"Good morning," Tommen said, and Brienne had never been so embarrassed in her life. "Who are you and what are you doing with my father?"

She was too dazed to say anything else but to start telling the truth. "My name is Lady Brienne of Tarrth. Two years ago, I was sent by Lady Catelyn Stark to accompany Ser Jaime to King's Landing in exchange for her daughters. We were captured and..."

"You were with him when he lost his hand," Tommen interrupted, and Brienne could barely spare some life force to nod.

"Tommen," a very sleepy roar came from the ground interrupted by a more surprised one, "Brienne! Where in the seven hells have you been?"

"The Tyrells had the Red Keep closed. I could not come in." It was everything she offered as an explanation. The rest was too humiliating to tell, especially in front of his son. Maybe she would tell him later when they would be alone.

"Father, is she a friend?" Tommen asked.

"She is the reason I didn't die when the Bloody Mummers cut my hand," Jaime said very seriously to the boy.

"But mother says it was Maester Qyburn who saved your life," the boy objected.

"Qyburn is no maester," Jaime snapped, "and he did save my body, but the Lady Brienne gave me something more important."

"What is it, father?"

"She returned to me the desire to live," Jaime said.

"What is that, father?"

"Tommen, did you ever feel so sad that you wanted to die?"

The boy went pale and turned his eyes to the ground.

"I thought so. Now think of the person who made you forget that feeling, and tell me if that person is a friend, or not."

**Tommen**

Tommen looked at Jaime with adoration, for the person who had saved him was more than a friend. It was his father. But he couldn't tell him that. Father's _friend_ wore another scared look in her innocent looking blue eyes, prompting Tommen to take in all of his surroundings.

They were not alone.

A man with dark greying hair, wild like a bush of uncut roses, came into view, leading a bit older lad with eyes blue as polished steel mirroring the sky before the tempest.

"Good morning, Tommen," he said. "And welcome. My name is Mance, and this is Gendry. He lived like a royal bastard in King's Landing before you did, and he knows a good man with a soft heart for bastards. He will take you to him until we find a better place for you. If your father allows it."

"If anything happens to my son," Jaime said coldly, "I will have your life for it."

"Ser Jaime," Lady Sansa came in view as well, "when I enjoyed the hospitality of Lord Baelish in the Eyrie, he taught me that the best place to hide was in plain sight. He was right. About that, at least. No one has ever seen Sansa Stark in his natural daughter, Alayne Stone."

"What do you have in mind? Speak plain, my lady. I am not my sister despite sharing her golden looks," father said impatiently while Tommen wished he could trust Sansa. She was always kind to him and Myrcella, his sister, even when Joffrey had her publicly beaten in court.

"Gendry lived with a master smith," Sansa explained. "He will take Tommen to him and get him a good armour. King Aegon seems to have a different Kingsguard now, all made of young lads, almost children. Your former squires are in it and so is the son of Lord Blackwood, all of them alive. But the young king trusts Robert Arryn and Ned Dayne above all. Sweetrobin and Tommen played together as children, and I took care of him in the Vale. If I asked it of him, I am certain that he would help Tom Waters become one of Aegon's guards."

"Jaime," Lady Brienne told his father in sudden inspiration. "It is madness. But it might work." And then to him, the _bastard_ : "Don't you want to be a knight like your father before you? There is no greater honour."

Tommen clapped hands, giddily, considering the words of father's lady friend: "Than I could have a real horse in place of kittens. That's exciting! Joffrey never let me have one, or mother. They said I could not ride well."

He stopped rejoicing when he realised that father looked overridden by the enthusiasm of everyone else, worried, and deeply sad.

"All right, Tommen," he said. "Be brave. Remember: only show your face to Lord Arryn as long as the court is full of roses. Aegon might spare you again, but they will not. How else are they going to wed Margaery to Aegon if she is already married to you?"

"But the High Septon can dissolve our marriage easily!" Tommen protested "I… We…"

"We all know that you are a good boy, Tommen," Sansa said with Petyr's wisdom. "But the favour of the new High Septon may come too costly for the House Tyrell. Even their stores of gold and food provisions have to reach an end. Winter is coming."

Tommen bowed his head realising with unmistaken certainty of a former boy king that killing a child only took the service of one man grown wielding a sword. _That would come cheap,_ he thought.

Behind Lady Sansa, on the outside of the open door, the shaggy man, Mance, was giving a dirty light cloak to the Hound: "For safe keeping," he said.

"I have stained my own white cloak beyond recognition," Sandor Clegane said. "Maybe you want to entrust your precious skin to the Elder Brother instead."

"Just keep it," the hairy man told him, not flinching away from the Hound's scars as most people whom Tommen knew always did. "He might be tempted to give it to the poor as a blanket against the cold. Rain will be upon us any time now. And the old gods will laugh heartily when the snow takes over this city and its inhabitants used to the stupor of the long summer."

Then Mance begged the gaunt champion of the Faith, completely covered in deep browns of the servants of the Seven, who was not even a knight; he was a monk, and nothing else. "Wait for me, both of you, at the Mud Gate. Be there some two hours from now. That should be enough if my gut instincts are not all wrong."

"That will be past noon," the monk said. "Won't you be late to meet Princess Daenerys?

"Princess? What is she all of a sudden? A friend of yours?"

"You are my friend, Mance," the monk said. "Like Sandor Clegane is my brother. I am worried about you, is all. Contrary to your opinion of me, I am not the only one in this company with the propensity to do foolish things for the benefit of others."

"Well said, Elder Brother," Mance laughed. "I may yet remember this for my play."

But he did not heed the holy man's warning, his large feet in tight furry boots carrying him smoothly away, his shaggy hair reflecting the rustling of his tunic in the chilly wind from the sea blowing over the capital.

**The Fishmonger Woman**

The fish market in front of the Mud Gate was large and noisy, brimming with people from the early hours of the morning as if the city had not been under siege.

"Stannis, he was something," said a fishmonger to a fishmonger woman. "That was a serious battle, fleet and all. Until Lord Imp had the grace to burn the sea, and the ghost of Lord Renly Baratheon chased him away."

"Shut up and sell your fish," the woman told him, "before the dragon queen spies hear you and she feeds you to her dragons to break their fast. Dragons eat children, everyone knows that. But if they are hungry, they could feast on you as well."

Her words made a slender, hooded, common woman studying her stall drop a fish she was examining back in one of the wooden crates.

"An excellent choice," the fishmonger woman said, trying to make her customer reconsider. "Fresh from the bay, we set out at night and the black fleet didn't see us."

"The lady will still look further and think about it," said a young voice of a knight, fully dressed in a suit of armour, helm and all, in a company of a tall dark haired female figure in a regal cloak of black and purple.

The fishmonger woman looked after the three odd customers walking away from all the stands towards the Blackwater Rush, its surface a glimmer of gold, where the weak early morning sun could still pierce the rain clouds drawing nearer. She was determined to ignore arrogant, probably highborn customers, who could not distinguish fresh from rotten fish. Fathers from honourable families of commoners luckily already pressed themselves to buy fish for their table, and the occurrence was soon forgotten with the clanking of copper and silver in the woman's ears.

**Aegon**

"You are early," the young knight spoke first, standing as close as possible to the woman he brought with him.

"So are you," the short thin woman replied casually. "We share that in common, at least, if not the blood you _claim_ to possess. Neither of use seems to be able to wait."

"I claim nothing, but what they told me was truth since I remember myself," Aegon answered honestly, suddenly needing to observe the sky. There were only grey clouds, sailing, but they breathed as his mortal enemy. "You are not alone," he said, realising what must have been flying above them and unconsciously made a step closer to Jeyne, for reassurance, if not protection. There would be no salvation if the fire rained down on him for the sky.

"You are not a dragon," Daenerys said, letting show a strand of silvery hair from under her hood. "I know that much now. But it still remains to be seen if you are my nephew or not. I must say that I do not know how to reach the bottom of the truth on that particular matter."

"How can I be your nephew if I am not a dragon?" Aegon asked sardonically.

"Viserys _was_ my brother," his aunt said fervently. "But he was not a dragon."

Aegon laughed incredulously, and the conversation stopped. Fearing the silence, he continued. "I wanted to wait for you in the field when I came to the city but my councillors made me withdraw within its walls. I have regretted my choice ever since. What did the foreign singer tell you to make you talk to me?"

"He made me doubt," she said, carefully. "Of what?" Aegon blurted.

"Nephew," she said with hatred in her voice, "are you as dumb and as honourable as you seem? Or shall we stop joking and start the dance of the dragons and see whom the gods favour? I am weary of idle talk, treason and lies. You have recognised that I have come here with the only child of mine that is left to me."

Aegon did not understand a thing. He opened his helm as much as he could without provoking the eyes of the crowd to recognise their king, and looked at his aunt who seemed small, and suffering, and not what he expected her to be. Yet she was cruel, or she could be, if she so wanted, he had no doubt.

Jeyne started to gurgle insistently, pointing at the sky.

"Your companion wishes to talk," Daenerys noted, slightly amused, her anger gone or carefully hidden.

"She cannot," Aegon said. "She is special."

"Do you know, at all, dear _nephew_ , _what_ she is?"

"I respect her, and I admire her. Isn't that enough to know?"

"Drogon will help," Daenerys closed her eyes, focusing, and Aegon thought how easy it would be to run the Sword of the Morning through his aunt's heart and how maybe the dragons would obey him then, would bow to Rhaegar's son and heir. The thought was intriguing, and appalling, joyful, and sick. Bright as the gleaming of the sun on the swords of the Golden Company when they stormed the Storm's End under his lead, breaking the legend of the unconquerable fortress of the Baratheons, where Stannis Baratheon had held under siege of the dragon loyalists almost until the bitter end of death from hunger.

Daenerys opened her eyes, and Aegon's temptation was over. The purple in them was curious, and unveiled, for the first time.

"Aegon," she told him, "may I ask for the honour of your lady's company to visit my ships. No harm will come to her, I assure you."

"And who would you give me as a hostage?" he asked, standing protectively in front of Jeyne. "Surely not your dragons?"

"The dragons do not allow themselves to be taken hostages. They are beasts, and they can never be fully tamed," Daenerys explained.

Jeyne murmured softly like river water, touching Aegon's vambrace. The cold of her grasp passed through the already cold metal and made Aegon's heart beat faster.

"She accepts it," Daenerys said. "Aegon, I will not say this twice. Please."

Aegon tried to look at Jeyne's face for a clearer sign of her approval, but she just coiled under her hood as was her wont, always hiding from him. An icy grip on his armour tightened. And then Jeyne stood next to Daenerys, abandoning his side, she who had saved his life.

Aegon stepped back.

"Jeyne will return to you before the nightfall," Daenerys said and Aegon dared believe her. There was no other way his aunt could have learned her name if they were not somehow able to talk.

"I will wait eagerly for your return, my lady," he said. "My aunt," he bowed to Daenerys and walked back to the Mud Gate, helm closed, terribly alone, fearing betrayal from all sides, ignoring the clamor of the market and splatter of still wet fish being pushed in front of his eyes as a possible purchase.

When he crossed the gate, five armed sellswords of the Golden Company were dragging between them a man severely beaten up in the direction of the Red Keep. His face was almost unrecognisable, but there was something about the hair and the attire that attracted Aegon's attention. It was Mance Rayder, the man who arranged his conversation with his aunt. Which may have not been entirely successful but Aegon had at least survived it.

"What is this?" he said, unclasping the helm to reveal himself. "By whose order are you apprehending this man?"

"Your Grace," the leader bowed to the ground, " he wanted to break into the dragonpit against the standing orders of Your Grace, claiming you have allowed him to use it to rehearse a mummers' show. He wouldn't leave, so we had to persuade him to. He spoke so fervently of wishing to see you in person that we feared he would attack your life and gave him a little lesson in obedience to his king. We were taking him to Lord Connington and Lord Baelish for their judgment."

"I am the king," Aegon said steadily, "Others do not deal judgment in my stead. Release him and do as he says! Moreover, you will let him come and go to the pit as he pleases, and you will guard it from any intruders he doesn't want to have there! Or I will have your heads put on spikes above the Mud Gate tomorrow at dawn."

"Thank you," the northern singer managed to say through swollen lips, one of them still cut open, dripping fresh blood. "I trust that both you and your aunt will enjoy the show one day, and never regret your decision."

Aegon gestured two of the sellswords to follow him to the Red Keep. The others were left speechless, as the criminal they believed they caught straightened up gingerly despite several cracked ribs, wiped the blood from his lips, and flashed them a crooked smile.

"Well, my lords," he told them, wrapping a white cloak around his bruised body, given to him by a huge man who suddenly stood by his side, with an imposing greatsword on his back. "Now that we have clarified this little misunderstanding, I will tell you exactly what I want you to do…"

**Mance**

The dragonpit was the most abandoned of the abandoned places in King's Landing. No one has set a foot in it for years, not for any purpose, evil or less so. The space was vast and hollow, dug deeply in the ground, the bottom made of stone and clay, many times stepped over. Many old chains and locks still lay where the dragons must have been before all of them were gone from the face of Westeros. _Chained and left to die._ _How could the Targaryens let the magnificent beasts disappear if it is true that the same blood ran through their veins?_ Mance Rayder wondered. Two smaller cages for a smaller dragon, which could host two great bears kept together, loomed empty on the sides of the dragonpit.

On top there was a huge iron grid allowing the sun in, or any other colour of the sky. Dark clouds sailed slowly over King's Landing that day, mourning for a loss unknown.

The grid could not be forced open by a human hand, only by a turning mechanism set outside the entrance, at the level of the street, which miraculously still worked after centuries of disuse. When the grid would be closed, those inside could not get out, trapped as beasts. The only way out for a human foot was using a rope that was hanging now on one of the sides. The rope could be lowered down and raised back up on one of the sides, and used to scale the irregular wall all the way up out of the cage.

The dragonpit was such that nobody's spies would have access to it. It was doubtful that the old Targaryen kings, even the crazier ones, would have dug subterranean passages leading from the Red Keep to the company of angry dragons abandoned to their sad fate. Baelish, Varys, the queens, any of them, Daenerys, Tyrells, and many others Mance did not hear about yet, would never know what words were about to be spoken in the utmost safety of its horrid walls. And the natural movement of the sound would make any conversation at its bottom sound like gibberish to the oafs from the Golden Company stationed on the street, guarding them from everyone.

It was just as Mance wanted it.

And it was worth one broken, and a few bruised ribs, a few new cuts on his face, and a reproachful look of the Elder Brother when he treated his wounds.

There was only a small problem; the headless body of Ser Gregor Clegane was still twitching in one of the corners, chained, helpless as a newborn child.

Mance gave the Hound only one look. The tall man understood him and sat down, brooding, next to his brother's corpse, nervously picking the ground with the Elder Brother's lance, the weapon that defeated the monster, once. _In need, it could do it again_ , Mance hoped, praying to the old gods not to punish him for disturbing the sleep of the dead.

But Gregor Clegane was not yet fully dead, and he prayed that the ghosts of the dragons would not mind. After all, his song was about them, too.

The King-beyond-the-Wall and the Hound descended to the dragonpit alone with the two unwilling players in its middle. Unconvinced, but eager to pay for their debts, real or imagined. Who was Mance Rayder to object to such noble feelings? It was very good, as long they were able to read.

"This is ridiculous," Jaime voiced his unease as he studied the dragonpit, a glint of mockery in his green eyes.

"Than let's get over with it, and you will be back to your busy life, Lannister," said Mance. "Any feasts to attend? Might be I could sing at them."

The Hound chuckled, and the Lady Brienne gave Mance a hurt look, scorning him: "We agreed that we would read your verses, not listen to your insults."

And so they started. Mance sat on the ground and crossed his legs in front of him, wondering how Jaime Lannister would sound when the trial was over.

**Brienne**

"Ashara," Jaime exhaled with relief, opening the door to one of the inner cages of the dragonpit, as the wildling king asked him to do. "I'm home," he told Brienne, sounding like he wished he were telling the truth.

"You took my child!" she accused him, as if she had been waiting for him only to throw those words in his face. She wondered where the unseemly conversation was heading, and how would she, Brienne, respond in life if she were a mother and her child was taken away. It was a thing too difficult and too distant to imagine. So she chose to relive the loss she felt when the evil shadow of Stannis Baratheron pierced Renly's heart with the cursed sword, and hoped that the trembling in her voice was convincing enough. The singer, at least, did not object. "You rode away, and you let them have him! And now you return to me, wanting everything to be the same."

"Rhaegar was generous in this, Ashara," Ser Arthur Dayne begged of his sister. "And both Elia and he were in need of help. Aerys would have sent her away if she didn't bear an heir, or done worse to her. You know him. And if she bore another child of her own, she would have died. The maester Rhaegar had brought from the Citadel, the one not paid by his father, was very clear on that. I could not entrust these tidings to a mere raven. This protects everyone."

"Will it protect me when I cry in the deep of the night and my breasts run dry of milk, and my mind goes mad from missing my son?" Ashara asked of the unmoving air in the pit.

"Ashara," Ser Jaime Lannister read his next words and froze, visibly, forgetting his self-assuredness from moments ago, " _our_ son will be Rhaegar's son and heir and the future King of the Seven Kingdoms. Both Rhaegar and Elia will adore him. You will see him grow and become a greater knight than I ever was."

"But never hold him as my own," Brienne said imagining Renly's dead body in her mind. The image soon disappeared when a familiar hoarse whisper crept to her through the dark glimmer of the pit, while pale daylight lingered over the players through the great iron bars very high above them, too distant to seem real. Brienne understood in fear that from that moment on it was neither Jaime talking to her, or Ser Arthur Dayne to Lady Ashara.

It was Ser Jaime, a knight of the Kingsguard, who spoke to Queen Cersei, his sister.

"Do you think it was easy for me? Not to be able to call him my son, not to be able to hold him in my arms, not to be proud when he makes his first steps? It is killing me! But it's better than that he grows in Starfall as a Stark bastard, to be sent away to the Wall or to die in some ignoble battle."

"Ashara, I love him as I love you! I was afraid to have a child but now that we have it I love him more than I ever thought possible. Please, believe me..."

"I do believe you Arthur," Brienne said, and she didn't have to search in past memories to find the feeling for her next line. It was exactly how she thought about Jaime, her affection for Renly a mere whim of the child in comparison with what the Kingslayer had stirred somewhere in the pit of her soul. "When you sought me out first, I thought it a cruel jest. The gods have not made us one for another. But the truth is, I have loved you even before you reached for me. Before you raised a finger to touch me in a way that was not brotherly. I would just not be able to tell. It is one thing to be called a Beauty among many beauties of Dorne and another to love a man outside your reach. The only thing that frightens me, Arthur, is the wrath of the gods. They will see us and they will remember. Brothers and sisters are not meant to be lovers."

"Ashara, what else can the gods do to us that they have not done already? People already gossip even in the capital that Brandon Stark was your child's father. Isn't that enough?"

"Isn't that what you wanted?" the lines on the parchment were underlined, and the word angry written under. Brienne evoked the feeling of their first days on the road when she hated Jaime with all her heart. "You wanted it! You asked for it!" she forced herself to scream where all she wanted was to let him weep in her arms, to forget the cruel scene he had been forced to read with her.

"I wanted what?" Ser Arthur asked, uncertain.

"That I go to Brandon and…" Ashara stuttered. "There was only one way to let the spies we have even here to take such word to Aerys as would protect everyone, as you say…"

Ser Arthur paced around his sister in mute understanding, stung.

"I never wanted you to lay with him! Only to make them believe…" his gaze supplicated her to contradict him but there were no words written on her parchment that would help him out. Taken by despair, the fingers of his left hand grabbed a mass of gold on top of his head that should have been silver if Jaime had been the Sword of the Morning.

"Won't you raise your hand on me, Arthur?" Brienne read, blushing prettily from the content of her next line. "It's what a whore deserves…"

Ser Arthur Dayne stood still in his steps and set a quivering hand and a stump on his sister's shoulders. Willing to calm them both down, he said quietly, "When Rhaegar is King, Ashara, we will not have to hide any more."

"Won't we?" Ashara asked. "Kingsguard is for life, sweet brother. And what of Elia? Moon tea is not always safe as I should know best. I have been drinking it for years, and then we had Aegon."

"They are not... they haven't been, not any more, not since Rhaenys was born…" Arthur mumbled, afraid of the walls of his own keep.

"But she loves him," Ashara had to note. "As deeply as he respects her, but he loves her not. Alas for Elia, beautiful and kind beyond the ordinary of this world!"

"Surely," Arthur said, "yet her destiny is many times better than that of many other women of noble birth, who marry a man who manhandles them, or kills them in the end to receive their inheritance. Rhaegar will keep her safe."

"But he will never love her..." Ashara said. "Safe is not enough."

"That is why I will not marry, brother. It's not because I fear the dominion of men. No husband could overthrow Ashara Dayne into subservience. But marriage without love is like a land without water, withering before reaching its spring." Brienne could cry from beauty of the dead woman's words, but she forced her ugly face to stay even, for Jaime's sake.

Ser Arthur Dayne went to his knees. "Marry me, then," he begged, "I will abandon the Kingsguard and make everything known. Everything except Aegon. I can no longer take him away. We can go to Essos where no one will know about our parentage. We can have more children."

"If it were only that simple," Ashara said sharply, and turned to leave. "I will not marry you, brother. You have taken away my son without asking my approval. We are no longer."

"Ashara, wait," Jaime said and advanced to Brienne, forcing her to turn back, unbothered by the fact that she was several inches taller. Brienne noticed how his parchment contained a scribbled instruction in the end, not a line to say, but another thing entirely.

Instead of instinctive falling back, Brienne waited, and found herself kissed in front of where others could see it, wishing the gloom of the dragonpit to hide her deep shame. Which only lasted for a second. It was different than in the dungeons of the Red Keep, searching, violent, tense. It must have been that he was reliving the kiss he had given Cersei before or after they parted last. So Brienne decided to ignore anyone who was watching. That was Jaime, and he needed the intimacy, almost like an abandoned animal in the street, the singer be damned. So Brienne kissed him freely, the best way she learned how, and whispered to him, hoping that the scarce audience would not hear.

"I'm not Cersei. Please, remember that."

He understood her, but only after a while, his kiss changing from frantic to eager, relaxed, almost sweet, before he abruptly stopped, nearly biting her lip when he moved away. The Hound was staring mutely at them, the singer howled in approval.

"Outstanding!" he said, "when you read it in front of the Targaryens, please, ignore the crowd, and stick to the lines written for you, but the longing and the tension you showed should remain. Those were two honest people. He hurt her thinking he was doing it for the best. And she decided to shut herself away from him in return.

Jaime looked unmanned. As if a flock of clouds of thick autumn rain had discharged their wrath over his handsome forehead and left him behind. Ravaged. Desolate. Cold.

"Ser Arthur and Lady Ashara," Lady Brienne voiced her understanding carefully, to break the silence, "they were parents of the young King Aegon?"

"I strongly believe so. But it would be best if you all forget that knowledge for now. It's a revelation that has to come as a surprise to both Aegon and Daenerys, not give her time to kill him first.

"Why not? If he's no true Targaryen," the Hound asked with cruelty.

"Because Rhaegar would have never let her. He truly took Aegon as his son, his blood. He was never able to see anything wrong in Arthur and Ashara's passion. They were faithful to each other, apart from the episode with Brandon as far as I was able to learn. Rhaegar knew well he would have married his own sister if Queen Rhaella had had a girl child. As far as I understand your southron customs, the arrangement was pretty normal for the Targaryens."

**Jaime**

Ser Jaime was still speechlessly staring at the empty edge of his parchment, embarrassed to lift his regard towards Brienne. He had shamed her in front two other men, not worthy of her. Imagining she was Cersei, cruel and detached in her calculated anger when she accepted him in her body but refused him in her life, upon his return to the capital as a cripple.

"Do you still believe you are reading the wrong role in my play?" asked Mance Rayder before he concluded his thought in a serious voice tinged with profound unjudging knowledge. "Kingslayer..."

The familiar offence Mance uttered for the very first time since the two men met woke up Jaime from his trance. And while he still didn't look his best, at least he felt somewhat alive.

"I knew who you were and what you all did before I had the good fortune to meet you in person, in the firepit of Lady Stoneheart." Mance spoke further. "I learned my lesson of the south as good as I could before attempting my luck under the Wall. Would that any of you had ever done the same with my frozen homeland in the middle of nowhere! Not even the honourable Lord Eddard Stark bothered. Yes, he wanted to ride against me, that was all. Thought of my uniting of the wildlings as too daring and dangerous. Denying the reasons behind my actions where they were yelling in his face."

Jaime stood at the door of the small cage, deeply ashamed of the wisdom of a wildling who had seen through him better than most people did. Who gave him to read words that corresponded better to the painstakingly hidden part of his nature than most descriptions he could fast provide himself.

"You were right about my role, I will give you that," Jaime said. "I don't know if this was the story of Ser Arthur's life or of your imagination, but this part, at least, closely resembles mine. The part of the sister fucking story people do not know about. Not in detail, I mean. I am ashamed for the disdainful ways I used to deal with you before. And also about taking advantage of the Lady Brienne during the reading, when I relived some of my more complicated feelings for my real sister. But don't forget that I was also right about one thing. You still need someone to read the role of the real me, of young Jaime Lannister who will stab Aerys in his back."

"We will come to that," Mance said giddily, "I have a few ideas and I will ask for your opinion about them. But we are done for today. I need to learn how the parley between the dragons went, if that will be possible at all."

The Hound gave one last careful kick to a twitching carcass of Gregor in chains, before they yanked the rope for the Golden Company to pull them up.

"So long, brother," he said, "I fear this is not the last we will see of you."

And with that blunt farewell the mummers' company left the gloom of the dragonpit of King's Landing, some in search of the real dragons, animal or human, and some with no direction at all.

**Brienne**

The bells of the Great Sept of Baelor tolled, and Brienne wondered who had died.

Rain, autumn hardy and cold, started to fall slowly, chasing away the last vendors on the fish market, their reluctant customers, and people from the streets. The soldiers withdrew in inns and brothels, not to let their armours rust, to the merriment of the owners and the unoccupied whores. When the city was almost calm, a harsh cry of a monster flying above the towers and the walls resounded in the dark grey vastness, calling for his lost brothers.

The raindrops grew in number, dense and unpleasantly cold like little balls of ice. Brienne and Jaime soon lost all sight of Mance Rayder and the Hound, finding their own way through the raging shower of the gods, old and new.

Brienne took Jaime's stump in her rough skinned hand, leading him carefully over the slippery stony slabs of the streets as a blind man. They both opened their ears to listen to the dragon's cry above.

"You have truly seen it?" he asked, shy and reluctant to speak.

"Yes," she reconfirmed, glad he started a conversation about anything that had nothing to with the two of them, the mummery or Cersei.

"How was it?" he asked with a beaming curiosity of a young boy.

"Wild," she said, "and marvellous." _Like you are,_ she thought, but she couldn't tell him.

The cry of the dragon still echoed through the streets, as a peculiar song of sadness and longing from the times long gone, incomprehensible in its intensity.

Jaime smiled peacefully, tired, much less young than he normally appeared to be. He pulled his stump away, and she wanted to seize it back. But it was only to approach her from the other side and coil his left arm around her not so thin waist, firmly. His arm just painfully long enough to serve as her point of anchor.

"There," he said, "as it should be. The Kingslayer finally protecting his wench, and not the other way around."


	30. The Mystery Bard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Mance Rayder is not the only singer in the capital

  **Sansa** **  
**

"They _will_ let you in to see your son, Lord Blackwood," Sansa told the elderly lord hoping he would believe her.

Nymeria was howling greedily at her feet while Sansa carefully arranged a septa's headdress over her opulent hair. Several years of dying it had not changed its unwarranted splendour. A gift, a burden, a sign of certain recognition. She had to put a leather collar to Nymeria, asking her for forgiveness for such offence. The wolf was so distressed of late that Sansa was afraid she could commit some atrocity in the city. The people would kill her for it as easily as they drew breath. Satisfied that her hair was hidden, Sansa had a moment of doubt. Accepting the robes of the Faith from Septa Lemore, a kind stranger, but stranger nevertheless, may have been another dangerous mistake on her side; to trust where she should not.

 _But what would life be without a little trust?_ she dissipated her suspicions with a warm smile, and gifted Lord Blackwood with a questioning, yet polite, stare.

"My lady," Tytos Blackwood said, "it is not wise. You risk your freedom by returning to the Red Keep. My son has told me that Lord Baelish counselled the king to invite you to stay there as a ward of the crown."

"I will only see Sweetrobin and leave. The city is full of the members of the Faith ever since His Holiness has seen fit to arm it in his great wisdom. One more septa will go unnoticed."

So they went, and in the end, Sansa was glad that the Hound was not there. _He wouldn't approve,_ she thought, ridden with guilt for not confiding in him, again.  _Or worse, he'd insist in following my steps and ruin everything with his lack of manners._

She couldn't have waited any longer even if she wanted. The time for midday meal was long passed and the heavy rain clouds covered the sky. Gendry would call at the gates of the Red Keep shortly before sundown, when the streets were the busiest, with Tom Waters hidden nearby. They would disappear at first sign of trouble. She should better convince her cousin fast.

The gateway to the Red Keep gaped open. No one heeded them at all. A cold draft ran through the corridors, followed by cries of murder and despair, getting louder as Sansa dared to approach their source.

"It's the young king!" A maid cried, long skirts rustling down the corridor. "He lies dead in his bed with the woman who warmed it."

Lord Blackwood and Sansa followed the commotion leading to Aegon's chambers. Sansa withdrew behind a column with her wolf, when she noticed Petyr and the freckled old griffin lord, leading the crowd of the curious and the grieving.

"Make way for the true king!" the voice of Sweetrobin was ten times more shrill than she remembered it, a predatory cry of a white mountain eagle, or a wild hawk. Between the press of the courtiers and servants, Aegon strode forward alone, his helm revealing his noble looking face, and keen purple eyes.

"My lords," he addressed his councillors. "What has happened here?"

"It is a gift of the gods to see you unharmed, Your Grace," Petyr bowed an inch deeper than required, always perfect in his flattery. "It would seem there has been an attempt at your life in your very home. But alas, the hand of the assassin must have hit one of your faithful servants in your stead."

Aegon burst into his own chamber, like an impatient lad, not the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms. Sansa trod after at a safe distance, mingling with the shadows, wishing to see, but not to be seen. Lord Blackwood was never far behind.

"It's Peckledon, and Pia, his paramour!" Aegon cried. "He was on guard at dawn. I had to leave on an urgent errand and I asked him to take my place until I should return…"

"Your Grace," Petyr instructed subserviently the King. "The High Septon, on whom so much depends, would not take kindly to your referral of such questionable customs from Dorne with any honour… Perhaps the body of the courtesan should be removed…"

But Aegon was already touching the bodies while the orange-headed griffin lord turned upside down the empty flagon of wine at the bed side.

"It was Arbour gold," he said. "And not only. It smells of nothing but it had to be tampered with. I am not an expert on such cowardly deeds, but I would say that someone had laced His Grace's drink with the tears of Lys, exaggerating in a drop or two. Had the assassin been more correct in his use of the vile potion, they would die in a few days, of sickness looking naturally… A fever."

"Your knowledge of poisons is rather complete for an honourable lord and the Hand of the King," Petyr commented, underlining every word. "Yet it has been said that poison is a woman's weapon, or a eunuch's."

Aegon turned to look warily at Lord Varys who appeared in the back as a ghost, as if he had passed through one of the walls. _Maybe he did,_ thought Sansa, recalling the gossip of the servants about the hidden passages King Maegor dug under all the halls of the Red Keep.

"Who in this castle possesses the tears of Lys?" the king asked. "Speak and your life will be spared. Stay silent and it will be forfeit!"

"I do, Your Grace," a soft but determined woman's voice spoke.

"Septa Lemore!" Aegon exclaimed.

Petyr appeared shocked, but Sansa noticed how his only arm gripped the hilt of the dagger he always carried on his person, and a corner of his mouth bent, as when he would win an important victory over the lords of the Vale who loved him not; an upstart, a failure, and a lesser lord.

"I never wanted to imply that any lady has done such a vile thing," Petyr said with feigned sorrow.

"And I, at least, have not done any such thing," Septa Lemore refuted the veiled accusation placidly. "The alchemists discovered many uses of the substance. I take it as medicine, half a drop a day. It alleviates strong headaches when the sun is too strong in the south."

"I shall have to confine you to your quarters until this matter is investigated," Aegon said to Septa Lemore, emotionless. "I pray to the gods that you are found innocent of this heinous crime."

The septa advanced hesitantly and bowed to Aegon. "I trust in the great wisdom of Your Grace. If you would only allow me to examine the victims. They may yet live."

"No, Aegon," Lord Connington spoke before Petyr could. What he said next, made Petyr smile. "As much as I want to trust Septa Lemore, she should not be allowed to finish what she possibly started."

Sansa was scared for the fate of the kind septa. _She may not know that the boy she raised is not the same now that he has become king._

"Jon," the septa tried to say. "You know my healing skills better than anyone."

"Honour without prudent judgement is for fools," Jon Connington told her. "Rhaegar died as a consequence of it. What would you do, my friend, if I admitted to possessing this poison?"

"My lords," Sansa spoke and came forward, amazed at her own outburst of bravery. Nymeria growled at Petyr, who was staring at Sansa in a way which made her more uncomfortable then all the threats and the ugly words she had heard recently from the Hound.

"There is another healer, the Elder Brother, the champion of the Faith," Sansa's voice was losing strength and pace as she spoke. "Maybe they can be saved!"

"Oh, the Lady Sansa, such a gentle heart! Ever a lady as her mother before her!" Petyr praised her. "In search of the hospitality of His Grace, no doubt. It is not safe in the city for such a noble lady."

Aegon only had eyes of hurt disappointment for Septa Lemore. "Take her!" he roared to gold cloaks standing sheepishly at the door. "A guard is to be in front of her quarters at all times!" When the unhappy septa was out of his sight, he checked the pulse of the boy on his bed. "Jon! Lord Baelish!" his command hit them hard. "Have this Elder Brother brought here!"

The griffin lord obeyed and left, but Petyr showed no intention to leave.

"Have I not been quite clear?" His Grace eyed him suspiciously, for the first time since the victims were found.

"But of course, Your Grace," Petyr could understand defeat, even if temporary. He removed his legs, thinner than spits to roast the meat on, in the opposite direction of the castle than the one taken by the Lord Hand. Nymeria roared after him.

"Lady Sansa," Aegon said, willing his voice even. "You must have come for a reason. What would you ask of me?"

"Your Grace is too kind to inquire about my wishes," she said, mechanically.

"I have half of the mind to offer you my hospitality until this attempt at assassination is resolved. What frightens me most is that the attacker waited for the first occasion where I would be alone... Or unguarded by someone special, I should rather say."

"I could agree to stay if that would ease Your Grace's heart about my intentions," Sansa said. "But only if you would allow me a guard of my choice. "

"Fair enough," Aegon said.

"But to speak of my errand," she continued, encouraged. "I would ask you to admit a young commoner called Tom Waters into your guard. Sweetrobin knows him: from the time they practised with wooden swords at King's Ro… I wanted to say the Usurper's court."

Aegon laughed at her mistake. "Your words are as brave as your deeds, Lady Sansa, by addressing me in person. The Targaryens of old said that to risk waking the dragon is no small a thing. Robin, what say you?"

"The members of the House Stark have been known to die before forsaking their honour," Sweetrobin said, finding a calm voice of a great lord that lay hidden in the demeanour of a child. "Lady Sansa's father, Lord Eddard Stark, lost his head for it, at the hands of the Usurper's false heir, a bastard in origin and deed"

"Oh, Sweetrobin," Sansa's beautiful eyes swelled with tears. "My father did confess his treason before the people of King's Landing. He said what they wanted to hear, but Joffrey had him beheaded all the same."

"Your Grace," Lord Varys informed, slowly. "Queen Cersei offered Lord Stark a life on the Wall if he publicly confessed his treason."

"And he accepted it?" Aegon asked. "He lied for his life to be spared? That tells little and less of his honour."

"No, my lord," Varys said. "Lord Stark's answer to this generous offer was, if I can still remember it correctly, that we can go ahead and slit his throat. He would have died for his honour just like Lord Arryn had said. But in that case the queen bid me tell him, in no unclear terms, that the price for his honour would not be only his head, but also the head of his daughter, Lady Sansa…"

Sansa cowered, fighting to remain standing. Nymeria leapt on her chest, licking her face for comfort. Sansa staggered on her feet. "I didn't know that," she stammered.

Aegon's keen eyes judged her distress, at a loss of what to believe. "My lady, and if I granted you your wish this time, what would you ask of me next time? To marry you and make an alliance with the North as Lord Baelish already suggested?"

The quiet denial in Sansa's eyes, bluer than the sky on that day, betrayed her despite all her lessons in courtesy.

"No, Your Grace," she followed her reasoning with calm words, worried about the young king's reaction. _Will he imprison me like Septa Lemore? She was like a mother to him..._ "I am greatly honoured that Lord Baelish found me worthy of making such a counsel to you, but marriage, any marriage, is far off my mind…"

"Is it because your house is in ruins and you have no gold to offer to the Faith, to pray for the dissolution of your marriage to Tyrion Lannister? Once a septa would prove your maidenly innocence?"

"I haven't thought of that at all, Your Grace," Sansa said sincerely, a sudden clatter of swords dimming her last words.

The Hound was cutting his way to her side like an avalanche rolling down the hill when the summer snow would melt on a too warm day in the North, stopping at the last unmovable boulder before the valley. She heard him before she saw him, feral and tall. Her lungs tightened and the air was hard to come by. Water dripped from his lank hair. _So the rain has started,_ Sansa concluded, admiring him for a second that the courtesy allowed.

"It is only my guard, Your Grace," she said indifferently, acknowledging the Hound with a polite nod, worthy of a great lady, oblivious to the chatter of steel. "He must have been upset that I left my dwelling unaccompanied. The city is full of dangers for a lady walking alone as Lord Baelish rightfully warned."

Aegon raised his right arm and all fighting stopped. At least that part was easy about being a king.

Sandor Clegane stood silently behind Sansa, as a guard should, immutable like a giant gargoyle carved in grey stone.

"It is just that, concerning marriage,"Aegon said, sounding uncertain of how much he should reveal. "Lord Tyrell has brought me the body of the young Usurper Tommen this morning before dawn. It would appear he wanted to escape the dungeons and the guards had no choice but to kill him. His face was ruined by a blow of a mace…. A mass of flesh beyond any recognition."

"My grief is with Tommen's widow, Lady Margaery," Sansa raised her eyes and said with cheek, hoping that Aegon would be clever and understand.

A wide grin of complicity started spreading on the smooth face of the young king and stopped half the way. Sansa, for her part, understood that it would not do, a smile could not be left to blossom in the dark hall half filled with roses.

"Indeed," Aegon said, "I will say how sorry I am in person to Lady Margaery if the king's business allows it, after hearing out the people in the throne room. They have been patiently waiting until this late in the afternoon. And I extend my kingly invitation to you to stay in the Red Keep until this mystery is resolved. Your guard will be granted suitable rooms next to yours."

The young King's voice lacked compassion, and Sansa understood she had better accept.

"Thank you, Your Grace," she murmured.

"I expect you at my table for dinner two hours from now. It will be a merry feast! I haven't had time to break my fast properly today. Your guard can come too."

Sansa nodded mutely.

"Lord Arryn will see to it that the new candidate for my own guard is fit for his duty."

"Thank you, Your Grace. Tom Waters will seek out Lord Arryn at sunset, at the gates," Sansa said with unfeigned smile full of unbreakable trust in the existence of the gods. Didn't they save her unworthy life many times over and send her a faithful… _guard?_ She could almost taste his thoughts behind her, brimming with anger, wishing for them to be on their own again.

Sansa looked around, but Lord Blackwood seemed to have left. It was good. He and his ravens had a better chance of finding the Elder Brother on time than the griffin lord or Petyr.

Some guard or other showed them the way out. They followed in silence; the man, the woman, and the wolf.

**Daenerys**

"Lady Jeyne," Daenerys said, uncertain if the courtesy was appropriate. But if Lady Stoneheart wished to be called a lady than perhaps the hooded creature walking after her wanted it too. "Welcome."

They walked on the deck of the ship when Drogon's impassive voice reached a decision on Jeyne in Daenerys' mind. _"Not her,"_ she thought it said.

"Did you hear it, my lady," she asked of Jeyne who shook her head. "Would it be too much to ask you to reveal your face? I know of your… condition. It will not appall me, I promise, and…"

A gurgle startled her, and Drogon forwarded the message in colourful tones.

"No, I will not tell Aegon," Daenerys assured Jeyne. "If I wanted to, I could have done so already. He can find out by himself."

The hood of black and purple velvet glided from Jeyne's head revealing a pair of black haunted eyes, large and wise beyond her years. She was young, her black hair a flood of silk reaching almost to her waist, the only attribute she still possessed of a living being.

For her skin was ghastly pale and green, fragile like old parchment, the bones of her fingers visible underneath as sharp claws of a deadly bird. A large black ring on her throat where the noose must have been left no doubt as to what she was.

A corpse, a living corpse, but a corpse still.

Daenerys found herself moved by compassion for the unknown girl, and her unknown destiny, against all her other instincts in the matter.

The girl must have felt it because her broken voice was heard again and Drogon tried to assuage Dany that Jeyne accepted what she was. That it was not Dany's fault, just like the death of Hazzea, the child, had not been.

Daenerys willed her thoughts to halt, suddenly afraid, for unlike the Lady Stoneheart she had caught before, _this_ corpse could also hear Dany's thoughts through Drogon's endlessly scaled untamed mind. There was no other way she could have found out about the bones of the child presented to Daenerys the Queen, an innocent victim of her dragons' gnawing hunger.

"You see, Lady Jeyne," Daenerys started, losing her determination. "First time I saw someone looking a bit like you, if you forgive me the comparison, it was in the flames of R'hllor across the sea. It was a dead man with one black eye, missing. His emissaries took from me what was mine and I have been searching for it ever since. I went to the priest of R'hllor desperate for any answers. And the flames told my treasure was in Westeros, even if the priest was fair enough to warn me that the fire did not lie but the men who read its meaning might err. Until today I believed that this one-eyed man had sworn fealty to Aegon for he conquered the capital so fast, and with no fight. I even caught another woman, looking like you, prying around my encampment. I believed that she meant to murder me. She is resentful and bitter, but Drogon has seen her mind, and he claims that even if she has no love for me, she has never seen my children. Could you tell me anything, anything at all about the existence of other beings such as you? Where does one find them? Where do you find a dead one-eyed man in this land?"

A soft sound like the breaking of parchment came from Jeyne's mouth.

"You don't know anyone but yourself?" Dany asked, disappointed. "And why would you want to see the Lady Stoneheart then? Are you all in league?"

The dragon in her blood was woken up and Daenerys Stormborn contemplated ending her futile attempt at learning some answers by commanding Drogon to scorch Jeyne, her promise to Aegon be damned.

The real dragons did not parley, they conquered, and burned, and murdered.

The thought of her brother Rhaegar, noble and brave, came to stop her. _He would not let the dragon wake up._ Yet the old words of Ser Jorah Mormont, a trusted advisor who betrayed her, disappearing in Essos after she sent him away, cruelly reminded her of what the world was. _Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died._

It was the truth of the matter as it stood.

A strident gurgle, a dissonant screech, irritating as a scratch of a sword on a rusting armour brought her back from her thoughts.

 _"Rhaegar… was betrayed,"_ Drogon interpreted the dead girls's words clearer than ever, and bright violet eyes of the Mother of Dragons went wide open.

"What do you know?" Dany exclaimed. "Not you, but who else? The singer from the north? The one who would force my hand to listen to his insignificant verses? The slaves I freed granted me the only title that I care to hear, the only one that soothes my aged heart. _Mysha,_ they call me. Mother. I am their mother. I, who will not bear any children of my body…"

Dany was frantically interpreting more incoherent dead thoughts. "You may know something about what sits heavily on my heart. But in return you wish to see Lady Catelyn Stark first." The queen stopped thinking and called for the guards, not noticing how the Lady Jeyne covered herself again to wait for the Lady Stoneheart. The dead woman with a cut throat, her priest and her singer were soon delivered at the queen's feet.

"You shouldn't have freed the Kingslayer's Whore," announced the Red Priest.

"Hold your tongue, priest," Danerys retorted. "I haven't had you brought to my presence to make conversation. Someone here seeks an audience from your lady."

Jeyne glided in the clearing, stopping an inch away from the Lady Stoneheart, upright and unyielding. In a movement slow as passing of time she lowered her cloak again and defiantly revealed her features to the other dead woman.

 _I only loved the bastard boy,'t was all, was it so much to ask for?_ Drogon sang in Dany's mind, radiating sadness, unending like death, strong like life itself. Lady Stoneheart attempted to touch Jeyne's cheek, but the younger corpse recoiled. The noises she made reminded of a rustle of autumn leaves on the ground grown infertile from the cold. Dany wanted to cry. And the Lady Stoneheart did cry, even if she didn't shed any tears. Tears were apparently not something a mere body could shed.

Satisfied, Jeyne covered her face and faced the queen, bowing deeply, to the ground.

"The Tyrells, you say? Are you certain?" Danerys held her hands out and took both of Jeyne's helping her rise from the ground, ignoring the freezing coldness of her inhuman touch. Standing, she was much taller than Daenerys, of height with Aegon himself. "No, but you believe it strongly. Thank you!" the queen exhaled, admiring that her breath was visible in the autumn breeze. She had never seen it before in the vast lands she had known and conquered across the sea, always warm and suffocating.

"Ser Barristan," she called the Lord Commander of her Kingsguard, awaiting orders behind the Lady Catelyn and her servants. "Make ready. You and I, and Jeyne will share a dinner with Aegon tonight in the Red Keep. Drogon will see to our safe arrival and departure from that place. Have a raven sent to announce us. Kindly ask Aegon to include Mance Rayder and the members of the House Tyrell in the list of guests. Please, hurry."

**Sandor**

The Hound wanted to take Sansa in his arms as soon as they were alone in their new rooms. But she glanced at the heavy brown curtains with a pattern of golden flowers behind a somewhat dusty featherbed. Her well shaped lips turned so thin that he retracted to his place immediately, none of them a novice in the Red Keep.

"Do you wish me to leave?" he asked, cheated of a promise, still angry with her for going to the would be king. The trail of the wolf was easy enough to find and follow in the mud on the streets made wet by rain, and the Hound could still not forget how his heart went stiff when he established it led back to the Red Keep. There was some blood on the right sleeve of his tunic, and he unconsciously wiped it on his breeches, not knowing why he needed to spare her the sight. He would never look any better.

And Sansa Stark had seen enough blood already.

She shook her head and a finger journeyed briefly to her mouth in sign of silence, her eyes cast down, measuring him in a strange way. Than she stepped away from the larger room to a smaller one, with a window, and no curtains at all, a rounded table and four chairs. The ladies would use it for reading, or needlework, no doubt. The masonry was flat and thick in that space. If anyone was behind, listening, it was difficult to imagine a spy being able to see through those walls. A single candle burned on the table, illuminating the autumn greyness of the late afternoon, and the wind was carrying inside the last drops of rain. Sansa closed it better, and turned back to look at him shyly, almost in his face.

"I never thought we should both return here, my lord," she said.

The moment was broken by the servants bringing in a pale blue gown, a miracle of silks and ribbons combined. They offered to stay and help her dress, but Sansa politely refused. Nymeria lay in front of the door, calmer than she was in Aegon's chambers, almost slumbering.

Sansa returned to the smaller of the two rooms, carrying the new gown. She moved to the corner out of the line of sight of the watchful eyes beneath the curtain if there were any to be found.

"The weather has turned cold, my lord," she continued in a monotonous voice, markedly turning the back of the septa's dress to him.

He did not understand. _She does not mean for me to undress her, does she, now?_

"The feast will start soon," she said with the empty voice she would use to reply to Cersei and Joffrey, years ago. "We had best make ready."

But her body was alive, and it made a speech of its own. Unburdening the upper part of it came naturally to the Hound. The soft movement of her back when she leaned into his chest was a blessing of the gods that did not exist, her hair falling between them like a carpet of foreign silk. For the first time he could _see_ parts of her he had only felt before, in the flicker of the candlelight, and it was more than he could take. She held the new dress in front of her body, facing the wall. Not knowing better, he took her breasts in his hands, slowly, pretending to be helping her out of the bottom part of the robes she wore. She didn't find it unseemly the night before so he hoped it would be all right.

She shivered from his touch. Forcing an incredulous laugh that came to his mouth to disappear, he carefully followed the contours of her body with his hands as she stepped out of the septa's clothing and into the dress she had been holding. Tying her laces was an exquisite torture. He probably imagined it but she was nesting against him all the time, imperceptibly, as if she needed to feel his hands better on her back.

Sandor Clegane was half inclined to seek a moment of solitude before dinner to take care of some of his own needs. A ridiculous thought of the Kingslayer came to mind, considering if the man was now doing it with his left hand.

Sansa told him as if she could read his rude thoughts.  "Please, stay to accompany me to dinner, my lord." Her hand stretched towards him, begging of his own to tolerate the meaningless title she offered him again, for the sake of others, listening.

 _The dog has to wait on his master,_ he thought, giving her his hand. She took it as she never did before when he followed her to do his duty around the Red Keep. Her grip was determined and strong. Her thumb moved to caress his arm, unmistakably.

They passed through the corridors, tall and proud, as a lord and his lady that were to attend a feast with many guests.

"I trust that they still serve dinner at the same place," Sansa said, to break the silence.

They did.

Lord Mace Tyrell and Lady Olenna rose from their places in surprise when the new guests approached the table of the king. Ned Dayne and Hos Blackwood guarded the young Targaryen impostor, not moving a bone. Baelish was still on his feet, his murky eyes narrowed, keenly observing. Lady Margaery, also in attendance, didn't show any sign of surprise.

"Lord Tyrell, Lady Olenna, it pleases me to see that you are well," little bird chirped taking the seat next to the old hag. "Lady Margaery, I am sorry for your loss."

The Hound took a seat next to Sansa, enduring all the looks of despise, especially from the old griffin who should have been dead by now, seated at the right side of the new bastard King. _Does the boy know? Or did the carrions around him forget to inform him? Or is it all Mance's imagination._ Sandor Clegane did not care.

The place to the Aegon's left was suspiciously empty and the one after that occupied by Littlefinger. Three places loomed unoccupied next to the Hound, facing the king.

"Lady Sansa," Aegon said in a friendly voice, "I believe that you are acquainted with everyone present. And dear Lady Sansa is not our only guest tonight, not by far. The feast will be magnificent! Look!"

The other guests were not late in showing themselves, obeying the wishes of the young king. Littlefinger shot a murderous glance when Mance Rayder sat calmly at the Hound's side, ostentatiously wearing his unusual cloak.

But it was not all.

A silver haired Dragon Queen in a foreign dress, pale yellow and made of several transparent layers one above another, barely covering her chest but so long that it spread over the pavement after her for several feet, walked graciously through the large door, a familiar old knight in white armour in her tow.

"Nephew," she said, omitting any royal title. "Ser Barristan Selmy is the Lord Commander and the only real member of my Queensguard." Ser Barristan whispered something to his queen, and stood back peacefully in the nest of vipers, as a man knowing he was still among the best killers with the sword.

"Welcome," Aegon said. "Will you speak up your mind immediately or shall I send for food and wine first?"

"I am not of a mind to stay long," Daenerys said, remaining firmly standing, several feet away from the high table. "So I will be brief. I have a question for the House Tyrell to answer. What do your scouts report, my ladies, my lord? Is your seat under siege from air or from the sea? I do not take it kindly being lied to, so please answer truthfully."

The threat was plain in her voice, and the Lady Olenna was the only Tyrell who dared to speak. "Princess Daenerys," she said, "there are indeed rumours that the ironborn fleet has gotten feet and that it is marching from the Reach to Highgarden by the way of land, the slaves carrying their ships in exhibition of great power and cruelty. They take more of our people prisoners as they pass."

"Thank you for this," Daenerys said, and then to someone else, invisible, behind her. "And thank you, my lady."

The hooded woman in a rich coloured cloak slowly stepped into the room as the last guest, gliding carelessly to the free place on Aegon's left side.

"You have kept your word," Aegon said to his aunt, standing up on his feet, amazed, blazing with joy.

"What else was there to do?"

"You may be Prince Rhaegar's son, but Her Grace is Prince Rhaegar's sister. And not only in looks," said Ser Barristan Selmy to the boy.

"And here are my terms, _nephew,_ for the future of our relations," Daenerys spoke at length. "I will agree to seeing the mummery Mance Rayder wants so hard to show us and I will open no hostilities against you, or this city for the time being. Until I know who you truly are. But for my good will, and yours, the mummers' company needs to pay the price."

"And if I don't accept your terms, or if the mummers do not do as you ask?"

Daenerys exchanged a knowing look with old Selmy.

"I still remember my house words, beloved nephew," she said. "Do you?"

The silence reigned, unstoppable, in place of fire and blood.

"What are you asking of me, as a price to lend my play your ears?" Mance Rayder spoke to the Silver Queen.

"Not of you in person," Daenerys said. "Whoever attempts this task will not return alive. But if you want so hard for me to see the mummery you prepare, you will have to find another hero. He will ride hard to Highgarden, or to the Reach if need be, and take away from my enemies a trifle that does not belong to them, even if to touch it means certain death. This champion may chance to live only for as long as to hand it to a trusted ally who should have a large sheath or a barrel of steel ready to bring it to me. The vessel has to be made of such metal that can withstand fire."

"What is this _trifle_ , Daenerys Stormborn?" said Mance Rayder.

"A horn," she said. "And not the man who blows it but the man for whom it is blown has most likely enslaved two of my dragons. As of today, I am almost certain of it."

"This is a lot to take in, Princess Daenerys," said Lady Olenna Tyrell. "Our scouts do not report of any such details as you mention."

"That is why there is a need of great haste," the Silver Queen continued. "For it will be too late when Highgarden is conquered and burned. The war will be at the walls of this city and Drogon may not have a chance against two of his brothers driven forward by insanity. It will be a true dance of dragons to be sung about by singers in the times to come. If there are any left living."

"I will go," Aegon said, and Daenerys was surprised. "You would?" she asked.

"I would."

"And I would not permit it," Mance protested. "The success of my play depends on both of you being present. You command an army each. "

"You forget the army of the High Septon," the Hound added, thoroughly enjoying the scandalised look of most other guests when a mere guard dared to speak. "It may preach peace for it belongs to the Faith, but some of its soldiers carry more arms then three sellswords of the Golden Company together."

"If you accept my terms, Mance Rayder," Danerys said, "you will swear it on your cloak."

"Vows are not necessary," the singer said. "For where the need is great, there will be no room left for treason. Tell me, Daenerys Stormborn, is it that you would do this yourself? But if you do, you could lose, your life, and that of your dragon?"

Daenerys did not answer.

"I will think of a way," Mance said and his dark eyes danced vividly, "if Aegon is also willing to agree to all of this."

Aegon leaned his ear to the hooded woman next to him, and one of his brats, Ned Dayne, spoke something to him from the other side.

"We agree," Aegon said, seemingly drunk on night air. "If my lovely aunt would only stay for dinner! Beloved aunt, your beauty is unheard of in Westeros and it matches closely that of the Queen Naerys if the older songs can be trusted. I propose a toast to the victory over the enemies of the House Targaryen, of Highgarden and of the realm! If you wish, Mance Rayder, a host of Golden Company will ride with you on this courageous errand, as a token of my good will. Lord Tyrell, what say you?"

"Killing the enemies of the Highgarden," Mace Tyrell said oafishly, not heeding the subtle hints of his mother and his daughter to keep his thick mouth shut. "It is very well."

"It is well, then," Aegon said heartily. "Aunt, please, do sit at my table, even if you do not believe me to be your nephew. I wish not that people say of Aegon, Sixth of His Name, that he has broken the laws of hospitality. Give us wine!"

The servants hurried in as if they had all been waiting for the command.

"And I would have a song as well if I could, of old times, a song about Rhaegar, my father," Aegon looked at Mance, expectantly.

"Alas," Mance said, "I was in such haste to answer your kind invitation, that I didn't bring my lute. Only my longsword. I expected to be asked for a different music entirely."

Aegon's young face turned sad, but the Red Keep had a mind of its own. _Someone is always watching,_ the Hound knew.

A gentle tune, murmured in a deep male voice, burst from the crevices in the ceiling, filling every part of the hall with a lamentation flowing from the chords of a high harp, slowly forming into words, mourning for the world that was lost.

" _Rhaegar, the last dragon, the king's son,_ " the voice rained with sorrow,

_"From great grief he was born, sisterless, alone,_

_Destined to sit on the Iron Throne._

_He went to the Trident and there he died._

_xx_

_He left nothing behind,_

_But a broken harp, and a broken branch,_

_Of white weirwood a broken promise_

_And when he left he cried._

_xx_

_Once he dreamed of love,_

_Only once had he dreamed,_

_Not of his duty, not of his fate,_

_And only once he lived._

_xx_

_A lady swore him her soul_

_The Citadel of loyalty,_

_And the fastness of her love_

_The secret of her eyes._

_xx_

_Darker than the clouds they were_

_Over the fields in the far north._

_Dark pools of water_

_In the dark grove of the old gods_

_xx_

_She pledged him her faith_

_Her vows false as the spring_

_Her words a flight of an eagle_

_Under the mountain wing,_

_In the clear sky,_

_In the clear sky!_

_xx_

_You cannot hold an eagle_

_Not against her will_

_Through the tempest and the snows_

_Find her way she will,_

_And always fly free,_

_And always fly free…_

_xx_

_Rhaegar believed in a dream_

_Awakened, he despaired_

_His arms he shattered in a whim_

_In love, in anger, in shame!_

_xx_

_A new sword he donned, of mere steel,_

_A black helm on his silver head,_

_A black steed he chose_

_A black armour with rubies red_

_xx_

_To the great Trident he rode_

_To the waters of the Great River,_

_To the forks, to the ponds, to the isles_

_Where the water was deep enough_

_To quench the sorrow of his heart,_

_To quench the sorrow of his heart!_

_xx_

_Rhaegar rode to his death_

_To destruction he bared his chest,_

_The blow tasted sweet_

_and the fire clean,_

_Laid him gently down_

_to his eternal rest,_

_to his eternal rest."_

**Daenerys**

It was amusing how the noble guests did their best to ignore the sadness of the rhyme, all except the Lady Sansa whose eyes filled with soft tears. _"It is so sad and beautiful,"_ she told her guard. The genuine tone of her words made Daenerys narrow her lively eyes in bafflement.

Aegon seemed happy about the amusement, not carrying about its origin, the flagon of wine in front of him already half empty. It didn't escape Daenerys' regard that Lord Connington tried his wine before his king did. _Here is one who would bet his life that Aegon is who he says to be._ Lord Tyrell bit greedily in a boar's leg served with gravy and turnips, somewhat lacking in refinement she would expect from a head of one of the great houses. The clatter of cutlery and goblets of wine started to dim the conversations.

"Is this song of your doing, singer?" Daenerys asked timidly, finally letting herself sink to the empty place next to the northerner. Ser Barristan lowered himself in the chair next to hers, but he did not lower his state of alertness. If everything was a trap, they would have to make it alive to one of the open corridors to call Drogon.

"No," Mance Rayder answered pensively, "but the verses and the melody were like an ointment to my old heart. It was admirable."

"Is there any truth to it?" she asked, innocently.

"For my opinion on that," Mance said, "you will have to wait for your horn and the outcome of my play. Unless you change your conditions."

"I will not," Daenerys said. "I cannot," she corrected herself and allowed a look of open desperation to show on her face, only for the eyes of the foreign singer who had had his share of suffering.

"Do not grieve, Daenerys Targaryen. If it is within my powers to have this horn brought to you, I will," said Mance Rayder.

Daenerys noticed that Lady Sansa's guard was the only other person paying attention to their private talk, so she decided to carry it one step further, taking in the size and the strength of the man, and his horrendous scars. Ser Barristan had already warned her that of all the other guests in the hall, the dog, as her Lord Commander had called him, was the only one who could perhaps best him in the direct swordfight.

"And to you, and to anyone else who succeeds in that feat, even if he was my father's killer in person, anyone at all," she vowed in no uncertain terms to Mance Rayder, stressing every word so that it would reach the ears of the man they called dog too. "I would grant anything your hearts desired. I would protect you and your descendants, and any person you hold dear, from all harm, until there would be a life force left in my blood and in the body of my dragons. So swear I, Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, sister of Prince Rhaegar, who died unmatched in nobility."

The huge guard now stared at Daenerys with open interest before he turned his grey eyes to the Lady Sansa, conversing politely with the elderly Lady Tyrell. The man's keen expression slowly changed. But it was not impassive, as it should have been. The man and his scars eased in what he saw, mirroring an awkward kind of peace.

 _She must be the moon of his life,_ Daenerys suffered an epiphany, before deciding to have some turnips and gravy. Meat she could not taste, not since the golden locusts served to poison her in Meereen, not since Hazzea.

Only when Aegon was drunk enough, he thought of ordering his guards to find the new bard so that he could properly thank him. The guards returned empty-handed as anyone in their right mind could expect, but Aegon's right mind seemed to have left him, for the time being. The singer, whoever he might have been, did not wish to see the king, the sound of his harp and his clear metallic voice swallowed back to non existence by the walls of the Red Keep.

Daenerys was glad when the feast was over. She forced herself to compliment Aegon for the meal before she left. "Aunt, do come again to visit me," he slurred, slightly. "If I am still here to receive you by the new turn of the moon, it would please me tremendously…"

The Mother of Dragons was confused about his drunken abandon, stirred with a spice of burning hurt. "Lady Jeyne," she said kindly. "Your king may want to retire. The evening has been long."

When she turned to leave, Mance, the Lady Sansa and her guard were already gone. A mocking pair of eyes of a thin man, Lord Baelish, as Ser Barristan had told her, lingered on her hair longer than she would have liked.

Concluding that nothing in Westeros was as she was expecting it, she turned to Ser Barristan to take their leave, longing for the elaborate simplicity and wilderness of Drogon's mind as her only company.

 _At least,_ she thought, _"no one is sewing dragon banners as poor Viserys expected them to do."_

To discover the continent of her famous predecessors was not going to be an easy task by any means.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I own nothing as I stated at the beginning, but apart from that, it has to be acknowledged that the sentence "Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died" is a direct quotation from the Chapter 23 of the Game of Thrones book, Ser Jorah Mormont tells that to Daenerys.


	31. To Know Your Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where more characters suffer from identity problems than before

**Cersei**

The Merryweathers lived in an opulent house on the good end of the Street of Silk.

Wealthy merchants from the Free Cities in Essos would rent or buy their dwellings in that part of King's Landing. While Orton Merryweather was neither rich nor foreign, he could not afford a house near the Red Keep like the old nobility. Only a few steps separated them from the whorehouses who owned the lower part of the street, descending to the harbour, an everlasting source of customers and easy coin.

Cersei hated it with all her heart.

She detested the house even more than she disliked sharing Taena Merryweather's bed. And that was a lot to say. She tried to console herself by thinking that the woman's attention wasn't half as intolerable as the forceful trysts with the various Kettleblacks who preceded her between Cersei's sheets.

 _I am the rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms,_ she thought, _and they have all betrayed me._

She hated Jaime for not riding to her aid when she had a moment of weakness to write to him, and declare her love. Cersei had never loved anyone, or so she told herself. (To forget about Prince Rhaegar, his magical voice and his _refusal_ of her, the most desirable bride in the Seven Kingdoms). Her twin, Jaime, was hers to dispose of, a second part of her, like another arm she had to do her bidding. Hers to live with her and to die with her when the time came. Of late she even hated Tommen for not having the balls to stop the trial. _Even a mere Lannister boy should be able to do a simple thing like that,_ she steadily believed. She hoped that they were both left to rot in the dungeons of the Red Keep.

When the manly Lady of _Tarth_ ( _Was it?_ Cersei never paid enough attention to the _lesser_ nobility despite her father's wishes in the matter) snatched her from the dais before Tommen would have to sentence her to die, Cersei Lannister forgot her son. In panic, she only thought of running away from certain death by a sword. Safely back behind the bloodthirsty crowd, and dressed in a  _breathtakingly horrid_ peasant robe, she thanked her saviour in the most flattering tone she would use on the stupid nobles whom she would later on gift to Qyburn for his trials. It was not difficult to convince the dumb woman to find Taena for her. And it was even easier for Taena to approach the giant of the woman from the back and hit her ugly head with solid stone.

Cersei didn't think further than that. The fleeting thought that her too fast thinking was both her great advantage and her utter ruin crossed her mind, but she decided to ignore it. The salvation was what she deserved by rights, but warming Taena's bed tasted empty. It was too high a price. She willed away the thoughts of different embraces when her body responded with a fire of her own.

Fire was good.

The only thing that pleased her was to think of fire. To remember how the Tower of the Hand burned in red and golden blaze, finally bringing the much overvalued peace of the Seven to her cold heart.

She sat the ivory comb carefully down in front of the mirror, satisfied after passing it all the way through her long hair. The mirror gaped polished and richly cold, a shining surface caught in a wooden frame, carved like the leaves of the trees that never grew in Westeros. The flat glimmering glass showed the golden waves running down her semi-naked back, more full than before the cattle they called the High Septon those days had her shorn like a sheep. It was thicker than ever, she had to conclude. _A small miracle._ she thought, admiring her reflection. Her hair grew back in only a month between her naked walk of shame and her trial, before she even had to consider buying one of those false herbs from the market vendors and would-be magicians from distant lands. Or ask Qyburn to conjure her something if he could, without asking too many questions about how he did it. She brimmed with hatred at the thought of Qyburn.

Her ungodly maester was nowhere to be seen after her trial, which was for the better. She would claw his heart out with her bare hands for his lies about her champion. Indeed, Ser Robert Strong survived. But his pathetic defeat at the hands of the miserable monk was a different tale entirely.

It mattered not where Qyburn was. He taught her everything she needed to know. About the room far down in the dungeons, and the stairway dug by pyromancers in the high wall, which no living man could cross without being burned to his death. The pyromancers used gloves made of Myrish glass to approach the secret storage, devotedly populated with jars of wildfire for years. No one had seen fit to inform them of Aerys's death and the futility of their endeavours. Her stupid dwarf brother who believed himself to be so clever never used a quarter of it to defend the city from Stannis.

 _Know your friends and know your enemies even better,_ she remembered her father's advice. Cersei Lannister never once forgot that Taena was from Myr, her house full of tokens made of Myrish glass. The Ousted Queen dreamed of the day when she would collect enough glass fragments from her latest lover to see a skilled alchemist and order glass gauntlets and slippers for her royal hands and feet.

Then she would burn them all.

The mighty roar of the hurt lioness would be heard all over the capital, and her revenge would taste a thousand times better than ripe juicy raspberries served on a golden platter with too much cream.

"My queen," Taena called her from under the curtain of her foreign bed, even more luxurious than the rest of the house. "Let us retire for the night."

Cersei went to do her duty, eyeing the half-full flagon of wine on a rounded night table, and two empty goblets. The glasses were of ordinary Westerosi making, on the other hand, _the bottle..._ may have been of Myrish design.

"A glass of wine, my love," she said, placidly, discovering to her great amazement how not only men but even some women could be as stupid as Robert Baratheon when they allowed their senses to take over.

Cersei would never make the same mistake.

**Gendry**

Robert Arryn seemed like a nice enough boy who grew quicker than weed in the scarce weeks it took him to travel from the Vale to King's Landing. He welcomed Tom Waters and told him without hesitation that the body of _the Usurper Tommen_ was delivered to His Grace King Aegon VI that morning by the faithful guards of the House Tyrell. Tommen sneezed and bent his armoured head, before he gave the Arryn boy a grin through the tiny slit on the visor of his new helm.

Gendry expected them to enter the Red Keep and leave him be when they exchanged the necessary pleasantries, but a pair of dark eyes, sharp as a falcon's, studied him instead.

"You are Gendry," Robert Arryn said.

"You remember well, m'lord," Gendry replied carelessly.

"It is because of Jeyne," the young lord said. "She is grateful to you. She is a bit like Lady Stoneheart now… but not quite the same. She can still be kind to some. I know that she wishes to thank you for... For making it possible that she can still care for her sister... After her death... Willow is also here. King Aegon has been good to all of us. Just so that you know, if you want to join our guard as well, a place would always be found for you."

"I will think about it," Gendry said, his feet itching to leave the company of the high lords. The air around the keep smelled on direwolf, and he started to wonder what Nymeria was doing in the neighbourhood.

"If I do, I will not wield a sword," he told the young lords, raising gently the warhammer he brought from Harrenhal. He meant it, too. Gendry would not part with his new trusted weapon.

"You fight with that," Tom Waters said. "Like Father did. I mean like the Usurper Robert Baratheon used to do."

"I haven't been in a real fight yet," Gendry told the blond boy in an unfriendly voice, surprised by his own abrupt bitterness towards him. Tommen was not guilty for either of them having been born a bastard. Probably no one was. "Was he any good?" Gendry blurted back. "As a father, I meant, not with the hammer, m'lord."

"I wouldn't know," Tom Waters lied. "But I've heard it said that he had tried to. He wanted to be a good father, not only a good king. It's just that he was not victorious in most things."

"Why didn't it work with Joffrey?" Robert's bastard asked, his curiosity tearing apart the barriers of prudence.

"I don't know," Tom Waters said. "He was born different. As if the gods had thrown a coin at his birth and it fell on the wrong side. Like what can be read of the great Targaryens of old. Except that Joffrey was no dragon…"

"There is a dragon flying to the palace tonight," said Robert Arryn sniffing the air with awe. "I am of the mind to see it coming from the turrets of the keep, or higher. Will you join me, Tom?"

"Gladly," Tommen said, his green eyes flickering alive with lasting interest.

With that the high lord and a highborn bastard left, and a common bastard remained standing, eyes colour of shiny steel searching for Nymeria. Yet the offer to join the young guard of the new king tickled Gendry's proud heart and it would not leave him in peace for some time.

 _Would she admire me if I was a knight of a Kingsguard?_ He dreamed of a girl who must have grown up in the years that he had not seen her. _Would she be pleased? Or think of me as a stupid boy unable to wield a sword…_

The sky was clear and Gendry was not afraid of the black wings humming in the air. The beast stayed far above the clouds, not wishing to be seen, and the bastard was sorry for Lord Arryn who would not have gotten his heart's desire.

The rain stopped. And his search for Nymeria was going to take some time.

**The sleeping girl**

The wolves could not sit at the dinner table and as soon as she opened her other pair of eyes, not the grey, but the yellow ones, she knew that her dream was not going to last. The monk, who smelled of danger no one else could sniff out, would come to see her soon, but it was not him she needed. It was not her sister either, lost in her stupid songs. She could make her dreams last longer of late, what with the help of the great black beast that had her captured, but her time on earth would still be short.

 _I need to wake up,_ she thought as her sharp yellow eyes examined the room and all of her senses searched through the many evening trails and scents of people in the Red Keep. A faint one came in through the window her sister didn't close so well. It entered the chamber from the outside, from the courts where liberty reigned. From the outside the old pink walls marked with killing, treason and grief. Her paws took her forward swifter than the wind would.

 _My sister could wake me up too_ , she believed, but she was afraid, mortally afraid, that before that would come to pass her sister would see. Her sister would know. How she had hated her with all of her forces. How she nearly gave the gift of mercy to the hideous evil man who seemed to be the only one who cared about her sister, and not about their stupid titles and ruined halls of stone. The old blind dog had told her that when she wanted to _kill_ the ugly mean man in the woods near Trident with tooth and claw. The animals did not lie to one another like people did. But she had finally understood the truth of the Hound's affections only in one of her previous dreams, grasping a bit more of the hearts of men than when she abandoned Westeros as a smaller girl. And in her deep sleep, in the sleep where she was lost to all, she wept, both for the times when she was right and for the times when she had been wrong.

 _The wolves are returning and I have to wake up,_ the sleeping girl thought, and the knowledge was her own. Not of the god she tried to serve, nor of his demands of justice and gifts from far across the sea.

With that thought she leapt even faster to that other scent she knew, and which she had not been able to smell in her previous shorter dreams. _How did a Knight of the Hollow Hill end up back in King's Landing?_ The wolf sprang on the source of the sensation with all four paws, overthrowing the stupid boy and his pathetic hammer. He was no match for a creature from the ancient times, deemed not to exist south of the Wall.

"Nymeria," the boy said and she wished she could remember his real name, like she wished she could remember her own. "What's wrong with you?"

The direwolves could not talk. It was late, the dinner must have been over and the trouble-smelling honest-looking monk healer would not tardy in walking out, minding his own business, not seeing the stupid boy. That was good. It was best for them to follow in silence. She nudged the boy in his side and howled, once, only once.

"You want me to do something?" he inquired, and scratched the wolf behind her ears. Nymeria didn't bite him so she must have been used to him by now, and he to her. That was good as well, the sleeping girl rejoiced.

 _He may be not so stupid after all,_ the nameless girl concluded, dreaming still.

When the monk was out, the wolf ran after him and hid behind a high wall. The boy followed suit. Soon they settled in an easy rhythm of persecution, a hide and seek resembling a dance of sorts. The monk would walk, none the wiser, and they would tail him, hiding behind walls, behind wells, next to the city houses and in the empty space where the watch should have been. The wolf and the boy left behind them the gates, and their drunken keepers gambling in front of the door they were supposed to guard. The land stretched open, devoid of growth. The wolf and the boy crawled on all fours behind their smelly prey, towards the ship where the girl still slept.

And no matter how much she wanted to dream further, her dream had ended then.

The boy was left to figure out things on his own. She could only hope that her guidance had been enough.

**Elder Brother**

It was almost the hour of the wolf when the Elder Brother was done with tending to young Peckledon and Pia. They were lucky to be alive. His examination of a few drops of wine still clinging to the crystal on the inside, in the otherwise carefully emptied flagon of Arbor gold, confirmed the suspicion of the tears of Lys. The poison left no trace, but like with almost any other mystery of the lifeless matter, there were herbs which would reveal the presence of substances, give colour to what didn't have any, and those small helpers seldom lied. The flagon tinged red as soon as he applied them.

Yet it was strange.

Every ten minutes he would force several drops of water down the throats of the sleeping young couple. It was the only known cure. To let the water wash out the poison.

As he did it he pondered on the results of the trial. In the short time he spent in Oldtown, studying from the Citadel after the end of Robert Baratheon's Rebellion and at the beginning of his rule over the Seven Kingdoms, he discovered that the maesters had other uses for most poisons, which they would not share with those like himself, the workers of the Seven, who only yearned for knowledge to cure and heal. His conclusion was unmistakable. The wine must have contained a harmless quantity of the poison before another quantity was added, the one which would cause certain death but of natural causes in a few weeks, or months, depending on the bodily strength of the victim. The overall quantity produced the most likely unintended effect of instant deep sleep which the bodies would use to sweat out and release the poison through all pores.

Lord Connington who welcomed him briefly, before hurrying to the royal dinner, hinted that it was a failed attempt to assassinate the young king. _But why would then his wishful killer make such a mistake about the quantity of poison?_ the Elder Brother could not tell. Or maybe there were two assassins of whom one was incompetent and used an insufficient amount.

Either way, Peckledon and Pia were lucky, and so was Aegon.

The hours of the evening seemed longer than in the endless solitude of the Quiet Isle when the season of rains had started. He was so focused to administer the life-giving water in regular intervals that his arms and legs went stiff from lifting the limp bodies in half-seated position every time. Dusk faded into night, dark as ever. The lack of light sharpened his sense of purpose and determination.

One more drop each time for the young victims, and then again.

The Elder Brother lost all consciousness about how much time had passed, a night, a week, or a lifetime, when finally the girl, Pia, made a shallow breath and coughed. He may have been sleeping for all he knew. But the almost empty large jar of water witnessed silently that he had done his duty. Peckledon was next, recklessly changing sides in his sleep. He made them drink some more water and raised the king's pillows under the somnolent couple as far as it could be done.

The night loomed high over King's Landing, with no stars in heaven visible under its dark wings. There was no one to see him off and nothing more he could do for them. He let himself out of the castle and stepped gingerly into the gloom of the streets twisting in all directions.

It was not his first time in the capital but it was the first time ever that he had been in the Red Keep.

The air of the palace had filled him with anguish and dread. It was not a place for a hedge knight from the Reach. Soldiers with the sigil of the rose on their chest he saw passing in the corridors appeared equally foreign. An absurd thought that winter roses would have been more beautiful on the Tyrell banners than the omnipresent golden ones spread out of nowhere.

He had seen winter roses, long ago, when the fields of the Reach coloured blue in his youth and he could never stop watching.

He could not imagine how he could ever have been one of those southern soldiers, under the proud banner of the then young Lord Randyll Tarly. _Yet you defeated the monster, and you would have killed him if the gods allowed, just as well,_ he thought, still not able to accept the profound aggression he had discovered, watchful, untamed, in the bottom of his being.

He was tired, and his fingers worn out, flustered red in a peculiar way on the fingertips where small cuts were visible in the dry skin. Probably from the unworldly coldness of the jar with water. Yet he could not forget what Daenerys had told him in confidence; about a girl who also needed help. Sleep would come later to him when his heart would be at peace. The ravens, the shoes and the house of the fisherfolk would have to wait.

The Elder Brother had a ship to visit.

He left the city in decided steps, despite the lateness of the hour and the growing numbness in his limbs.

**Daenerys**

Daenerys sat with the girl.

In the queen's confused dreams of late, the girl didn't have a face and she wrestled fiercely with the bleak visions of monsters wrought of ice. But under the deck of the ship, the real girl was so fragile and so short of stature that the Mother of Dragons could not tell if she was a maid flowered, or a child still. Only her slightly wrinkled forehead for one so young betrayed the hard life she must have lived.

The girl herself lived in waking dreams.

She never talked and her dark-grey eyes would look ahead but they did not see. Her hair was brown, colour of ash, and her face long, narrowing to her chin. Even so, the girl was beautiful and she would become more so as the time passed, Dany had no doubt.

Just like she had none that the girl's thin sword would have pierced her heart the night when Dany abruptly opened her eyes in the hour of the owl, and found the girl gingerly seated on her pale silk clad chest like a herald of unknown doom. A pointy end of a sword aimed at Dany's heart.

The violet eyes must have startled the grey ones, or the gods that had created them all. The sword was dropped to the side. And the girl shook her head at Daenerys and judged: "They were wrong about you. You are not the one deserving of the gift."

Drogon was with them in that second but it would have been a second too late if Dany had not been spared.

It was the only thing the girl had ever said. Ever since that day, she only stared forward with dark eyes wide open, yet seemingly deprived of the normal vision of the world.

Daenerys tried talking to her and asked Drogon to do the same, but to no avail. The girl was like a parchment written in a dead language no one could read. Dany was of the mind that she didn't know who she was, or where she came from. Her faithful companion from before she crossed the sea, Missandei, had told her stories of slaves turning like that, like plants, after a particularly cruel treatment by their masters. But Grey Worm, the leader of the Unsullied who followed Daenerys to her lost homeland, feared an unknown curse that could rebound to the queen. While Dany learned to be afraid of magic, she could not fear the girl who had mercy on her when she had no reason to. Or no reason that Dany knew of, yet.

Since she arrived to Westeros, Dany had rarely been able to sleep. Sitting with the girl was one of her favourite ways to pass the time, lest the grief for her lost dragons consumes her and drags her into madness that overtook so many members of her house.

Drogon was excited all of a sudden, and the Unsullied speedy in escorting a new range of guests down as she commanded. It was a huge difference to the other evening when the night watch was kept by the Second Sons. The serious sad looking monk was brought in first. And then a young man, with that _direwolf_ again. The direwolf pleased Drogon immensely but her dragon would never tell her more about his reasons. Or he could not; for some things the dragons could simply not explain to a human being. Daenerys may have been of their blood, but her body was fragile and her mind detailed in different ways.

"Princess," the monk said in his serious demeanour. "I have come as we agreed. I had no idea I was bringing company."

"Come," she smiled to him, believing his sincerity, for the time being.

The uninvited lad stood still in his steps when he saw the girl. A mace slid from his muscled arms, bare to the shoulders, despite the autumn chill. The wolf just sat at the girl's feet and howled with a newly-found satisfaction.

"There she is," Dany said. "I captured her in Dragonstone. She sailed with me ever since. She never said a word except on the very first night."

"May I ask, princess, why do you believe it must be some great suffering that put her in this condition?"

"To fully understand my reasons," Dany said, "you would have to have dragon blood running through your veins."

"My blood is not noble at all," the Elder Brother said, "but my mind has gathered knowledge over the years. Mostly, but not only, about the greatness of the Seven, and their mercy towards sinful men. Try my wisdom, if it pleases you."

"Fire cannot kill a dragon," Daenerys said seriously after a long pause. "Once I passed through fire, unscathed, and my dragons hatched. And I understood the old words to be true, in my case at least. They don't seem to hold true for every Targaryen. My own brother was killed by fire."

"As was King Aegon V and his son and heir in Summerhall," the Elder Brother said with sadness. "Dragon blood did not help them at all. But what does that have to do with this girl?"

"When I passed through fire," Daenerys said carefully, "I was unsettled. In the first few minutes I didn't know my name. For several hours I couldn't remember my life. And for several days my life felt distant as if it did not belong to me. So when I see her in this condition for _weeks_ , I always ask myself what kind of fire could have burned her so?"

"An apt description, princess," the monk smiled, and the black dragon rejoiced again in the endless sky above. "I have seen men who lost consciousness due to a grievous wound on the battle field. I myself was one of them. When the body survives, most of them come back to their senses. Known circumstances, family members or friends, anyone who cares, can be of great help.

"I sat with the girl every night since we captured her," Daenerys said. "Despite that she raised a hand to strike at my life, she is dear to me. As a lost relative I never had a chance to meet. I was being too confident, I know. But if I don't trust my own reason, whose judgment can I trust? What else is there except the horror of fire and blood? There has to be more."

"There's always more to life," the monk agreed. "I know of herbs and preparations that could help healing her body. She has too little weight. And some of them assuage the mind as well. It could be difficult to find all the ingredients now that the long summer is gone..."

"Have you seen winter?"

"I've seen two, both of them very short and mild. Nothing like what seems to be coming now..."

"Arya..." the strong boy cried out to the sleeping girl. "It's me. I'm still as stupid as ever. Wake up! Hit me! Toss me in the mud..."

"You know her?" Dany asked. "Who are you?"

"I am called Gendry. I grew up as an orphan in Flea Bottom. My mother worked in an alehouse and at times as a whore and my father may have been King Robert, the Usurper, as you would call him. I will never know for certain but it is what everyone says when they see my dumb face."

"And she is..."

"Lady Arya of House Stark."

"House Stark was the ruin of the House Targaryen!" Daenerys said decisively. "If my brother didn't fall in love where he should not, and if he kept faith with Princess Elia, there would have been no Usurper's rebellion."

"And your father brutally murdered Lady Lyanna's father and elder brother Brandon who answered his call to come to King's Landing if they wanted her back. Some would say that makes the two houses equal in crime against the will of the gods and against each other. And it is no use crying over the snows that have melted..." the Elder Brother dared saying, surprising himself for defending Prince Rhaegar where his sister merely stated the truth.

"Who says so?" Dany asked, not pleased.

"Mance, the singer. It's just a saying, in the North."

"The North... Viserys never taught me much about it, except that it was cold, and far away."

"Princess Daenerys," Gendry begged. "May I visit her again?"

The direwolf growled. And Drogon told Dany in images of teeth and torn flesh that she would feast on anybody who would try and part her from her mistress, even on Drogon himself if she could. _A great beast,_ Daenerys thought, _fearless and wild. Almost as wild as a dragon. Rhaegar, was that what you had found? Was it so impossible to resist it?"_

"I do not see why not," Dany said aloud, turning into a queen. "We should tell the Lady Sansa, should we not? And to the corpse who would then be her mother. Let it not be said of Daenerys Stormborn, of the House Targaryen, that she was as cruel as her father, the Mad King. We are now in an uneasy truce. I will not move until the mummery is done; if Mance Rayder keeps his end of the bargain. Get your herbs together, monk. If she wakes, she will be able to tell who sent her to kill me. And than I will be able to decide what needs to be done with her."

"M'lady, m'queen, m'princess, Your Grace" Gendry rattled all the titles he could think of, making Daenerys smile one more time like a girl she was when she was not a queen. "Please, do not tell Lady Sansa just yet. Arya would not want for her family to see her like this. She was always strong and independent. Could we not wait a little bit? Maybe the Elder Brother can help her get better… If not, we can always tell them. You do me this kindness, and I will offer you one of my own. I will take up a place they offered to me in King Aegon's Kingsguard. I will be your eyes and your ears in his court. I will not betray the king's trust in any other matter, or raise my hammer against him that I will be sworn to serve. But you will know of any rumours or plans that could harm you even if they come from the king's mouth."

"That is very generous, Gendry, Usurper's bastard," Dany said gently. "I accept your offer and in exchange I will keep Lady Arya safe, and a secret, from all."

"Did you know, princess," the Elder Brother said as a curiosity, "that there is a drop of Targaryen blood in Baratheons as well?"

"I do. My brother Viserys thought me well the genealogy of the great houses of Westeros," Daenerys answered. "But their living descendants are nothing like I imagined they would be by their family trees."

It was Gendry's turn to laugh without fear. "I will come and see Lady Arya whenever I can, Dragon Princess. With news."

**Jaime**

Jaime took Brienne to an ordinary house he discovered only after Tyrion's escape, in an outer part of the city not even Jaime was very familiar with. He suspected that the only other man who knew about it was Ser Bronn of the Blackwater who didn't reside in the capital any longer. They were getting incorrigibly soaked as he guided her through the streets turned into streams. The size and the noise of the city, from which the secular dirt was being washed off by the onslaught of water, visibly intimidated Brienne, unused to so many buildings in one place and the multitudes of the idle and the busy alike, chattering under their own roofs to let the deluge pass. His arm never left Brienne's waist, leading her with his usual assurance he had almost forgotten ever having possessed.

Tyrion's house, at least, was far away from the walls of the Red Keep. It looked cold and empty, and its large windows were closed. Jaime forced the door open without a second thought. It rendered without a fight and they found themselves in a place of their own.

Brienne stared at him with one of her old looks  admonishing his well-proven lack of honour.

"Tyrion used to keep one of his whores over here," he hurried to justify his burglary. "The one that witnessed to him killing Joffrey and lay with my father later on. Before my brother killed them both…"

"What are we doing here?" she asked.

"The rent is probably still paid from the Lannister gold since no one bothered to cancel it. Unless you want us to share bedding with Mance Rayder or the Hound, we needed a place to go. And believe me, they both smell like shit," he ventured further, disliking his own honest words. _I should be able to find better words for her._ "Casterly Rock or Evenfall Hall are pretty far away and I regret to inform you that for the first time since I joined the Kingsguard I do not have any personal quarters in the Red Keep."

"How does that feel?" she asked.

"Calm," was his only reply. "Forgetful of plenty of favours I own Blackwood, starting from this wet tunic with the bloody tree on it, to the confirmation that Tommen passed safely to the Red Keep under the protection of young Robert Arryn."

"Whose father you have..."

"Killed? That wasn't me. That was only a piece of Lady Catelyn's imagination, one of many. Like she imagined that Tyrion pushed her son through the window, and that, that _was_ me. None of the Lannisters poisoned Jon Arryn as far as I know, not even my sweet sister. I wonder where she ended up after the trial..."

Brienne's trusting face folded up a like sealed letter Jaime could not read when he mentioned Cersei. _She will never be able to accept that part of my life, and I cannot blame her,_ he thought. _No one would be able._

"You know," he said to change the topic, dusting off the top of the empty fireplace with a wet sleeve, considering that the stone candle would fit nicely on top. _I'll get it tomorrow,_ he thought, _if it ever gets dry again._ "The Hound has seen your shield on the tapestry in his keep far away from your home, in westerlands, even farther than Casterly Rock. How do you reckon that the sigil of Ser Duncan the Tall ended depicted in such a distant corner of Westeros?"

Brienne's expression was less guarded again and it lit a small flame somewhere in Jaime's chest when she spoke her mind again."When I was a little girl, my father went to visit Summerhall. It must have been in the first years of King Robert's reign. The only thing he brought back was an old shield which later lay forgotten in the armoury. He never told me to whom it belonged. For years, I used to dream of a brave and noble knight who fought under the banner of the falling star, and a single tree on a sunset field, the most perfect knight of all."

"So you painted your own to be as noble as your dreams?"

"I painted it to cover an evil bat of someone else. And it has served me well. At the time when I did it, I cared no longer about becoming a knight."

"What did you care about?"

"Finding Sansa Stark and fulfilling my oaths. To you."

"To me?"

"To you."

"Wench..."

Brienne seemed uncertain of what to say next but then she gathered her not insignificant stubborn courage and spat it out. "You obviously brought me to this house for a reason. Shouldn't I live up to my other designation?"

"And that is?"

"Your whore."

Her proposal struck him blind. "Brienne," he said. "I didn't mean that, in the dungeons."

"What was your meaning then?"

There was still a bed on the upper floor and Jaime rediscovered they were not getting any less soaked. "I..." he stammered, keenly observing a patch of wet blond hair sticking to the scar on her broad cheek. "I don't want a whore. We did not... I did not…"

"Naturally," she cut him short. "I'm sorry for the asking. I can sleep down here and you can take the bed."

"Wench," he pleaded. "Come, you are a woman, aren't you?"

She stood embarrassed and alone, not understanding that he had no expectations of her, only wishes, and desires. And a burning pit of uncertainties if he was going to survive for much longer. Jaime's eloquence was failing him all over again.

"Help this old cripple then, to find some bed linen and tunics in the dead girl's chests, won't you?" he managed.

She surprised him by her sudden practicality which frequently followed her shyness like a change of wind at sea. Divesting herself of most of her wet garments without a moment of hesitation, she was the first one to walk up the stairs and soon he could hear the banging of the chest lids. It took him a painful ten minutes to undress himself sufficiently to be able to follow.

Upstairs, she was already in bed, amongst clean sheets, in a dark tunic. _Bronn's_ he reckoned with bemusement. Her hair was wiped almost dry, scattered around her flat face in a perfectly endearing pattern. He would kiss it off her face if it had not been his turn to be withdrawn. The room breathed of a home he never had, clean and simple, without deceit. And he feared that taking any action would make it go away with the rain, disappear in the realm of fantasy.

The light of the late afternoon illuminated the interior, the window hung slightly ajar, letting in some fresh air, chasing out the dust.

Soft dark cotton found the middle of his face.

"The cripple had best dress," she said in an purposefully offensive tone. "Aye," he agreed, "not to catch a cold, Seven save us from it!"

Contrary to his expectations, climbing into bed did not sever the magic, the perfume of cleanliness even stronger than before. He lay on his back and looked up. She was next to him and there was a good foot of space between them. Tyrion always liked big beds despite being a rather small man.

"Ser Arthur Dayne," she dared saying. "How was he in life?"

"Extremely handsome. Brave. A man of few words, and a master with the sword. I never figured how Ned Stark could have bested him in the Rebellion. Once he pursued a company of nearly fifteen outlaws from the Kingswood and defeated them all alone. He didn't earn a single cut to show afterwards," Jaime forced himself to remember the man as he had met him in his youth, untainted by the new image of him he had gained if Mance's mummery was not an ugly lie. _Troubled, passionate, Dornish to the core._

"A perfect knight of the Kingsguard," she dreamed her girlish dreams aloud in return.

"He would have been if he had a perfect king to serve," Jaime added. "He knighted me."

"I know," she said, rolling towards him clumsily, a wave of warmth washing over Jaime where her muscles lazily pressed into his. "And Lady Ashara?"

"Tall. Not as much as you, but still. Attractive. An excellent dancer. One of those women from Dorne who gave origin to their fame in the songs. Any man would have fallen for her if she so wanted," his memories flew free through the dam constructed long ago upon his wish to forget _everything_ after he stabbed Aerys in his back, justified or not.

"You are wonderful," he told her then. "Wonderful." He touched her neck where it joined with a shoulder as broad as his own. "Softer than silk."

She was more ashamed than in the dungeons, sweet words frightening her more than bold deeds.

"Won't you go home now, to protect your father from the dragonbreath and the white walkers as a good daughter should." His unspoken fear that she would leave him lurked behind his partially mocking words.

"I thought of that," she admitted. "But it may be that there is still something of valour to be done for the good of the realm. Perhaps the new Targaryen king or queen will be worthy of serving under their banners. Everything that we know seems to be changing now. It's a bit like the arrival of the summer tide in Tarth. Only the waters will rise higher, more people will die, and the feats in fighting the threat will be greater."

Jaime thought that the only place where the Targaryens would allow him to show his valour would be at the executioner's block when the mummery would be over. With those charming thoughts kindling in his mind he was not all that aware when she nested her head on his shoulder, curling her body to better fit around his. _This is better than home,_ he thought, all his fears and desires washed out by the autumn rain. He drifted into sleep like a loose barge on a plentiful river about to flood from the cold showers. And in his nightmares, the dead face of Aerys II melting into Jaime's own, held no power over him.

For the very first time.

xxxxxx

Knocking was gentle but insistent, on the entry door. Jaime woke up disoriented. Dawn was not there yet, but not far away either. The city was quiet, still sleeping in the mists of grey. He almost stumbled down the stairs, in a too speedy descent.

"Who-" he exclaimed, opening the door.

A gloomy-eyed septa stormed in, leading a huge monster and a shaking man, by means of pushing and pulling of a pair of long chains.

"Others take me," Brienne cursed softly, two steps behind Jaime's back, and he almost laughed. She must have sneaked after him, more silent than a cat. He would have giggled like a boy if he did not see the dead body of Ser Gregor Clegane in his new home, joined clumsily with the severed head of one of his last victims, Ser Bonifer Hasty. The monster seemed docile and tame enough on his chain.

 _No place can stay a secret for long in King's Landing,_ Jaime sighed deeply, rubbing his eyes.

"I cannot keep _this_ in the sept," Septa Tyene said, gesturing at the chained corpse. "You will need _it_ to do the bidding of Princess Daenerys. Only a dead man can survive a feat as she demanded be done tonight."

"What is it?" Brienne asked.

Brienne's visions of deeds of valour was coming truth in front of Jaime's incredulous green gaze, with an expectedly horrid dimension that accompanied the real battles in the world of men, the one that didn't have its place in the dreams of glory of the knights of summer.

"Mance Rayder will tell you on the morrow, I have no doubt," the septa spoke ruthlessly. "And you will tell him that Tyene Sand has left him a gift to help him on his new errand."

"Tyene... Sand? Prey, why leaving your gift with a Lannister?" Jaime said, recognising a sand snake, a natural daughter of Prince Oberyn Martell.

"This monster raped and killed my father's sister at the orders of your late father," the young woman hissed. "He squashed my father's head when father was not careful. Yet he _survived_ because of this other monster!" She yanked the chain tightened around Qyburn's neck, making the false maester choke miserably. "It is only just that _Ser_ Gregor Clegane, knighted by Prince Rhaegar, be he dead or alive, does his part to see Elia's and Rheaegar's son restored to rule. And I came to you, _Kingslayer,_ because your ungodly reputation makes you a perfect choice. If there is anyone who will not choose the means to achieve what has to be done, outside my own blood of poison and sand, it is you. You have to convince Mance Rayder, because he will not believe _me_ , that this _thing_ can steal the horn Daenerys wants for her, and then die in peace, or in seven hells, for all I care. And if I earned a place in one of the hells for the ungodly deed that I have done, by forcing Gregor to live again, so be it. This craven here," she yanked Qyburn again, "I caught him like a wild beast after your sister's trial with the intention to kill him slowly. But now I made him sew another head to the Mountain to claim my revenge. He says that whoever holds this chain can command Ser Gregor, and that the obedient Ser Bonifer should take it over from the Mountain as long as the head and the body remain attached..."

 _And when they don't?_ Jaime thought, remembering Tommen's story of a headless corpse in a killing rage. Oberyn's daughter was shaking with sobs she wouldn't let go free. She may have been as old or as young as Brienne. _Yes, Tyene,_ Jaime mocked her silently, _the ungodly deed, it is easier said than done. You will have learned by now.  
_

"All right," he said. "But you are staying with us for that pleasant conversation. You can start writing verses about it if you so wish. Mance is fond of those."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for the attention given to this story. When I started it, I never expected it to have over 100 kudos or 6000 hits. I hope anyone reading will like the further developments.


	32. The Vows of Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the characters are not kind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a situation bordering non-con in some aspects in the last section of this chapter. If that disturbs you, stop reading at the end of Brienne's POV within this chapter.

**Mance**

"This thing about the dragons," the Hound told Mance Rayder in a flat tone and paused.

They were waiting for Sansa in the godswood of the Red Keep, a modest grove of elm and alder, with only a few trees, and no weirwood in its splendour of polished whiteness. The heart tree was an oak, a poor dwarf brother of the untouched forests of the north. Yet it was a wood still, where the old gods kept their eyes hidden so that one day they could open them, and see. Mance breathed in the smell, of the wet leaves in canopies after the rain, the scent of the trees untamed, even if they could envy the height of their mighty siblings far away. A red plant grew under the heart tree. Mance didn't know its name but its colour evoked the red blood of the earth: the core of the white weirwood lost forever to most of the lands in the south.

"What about them?" asked the King-who-lost-his-kingdom-beyond-the-Wall.

"A dragon has not hatched for a very long time." Sandor stated indifferently. "And not for the lack of trying. The last such attempt led to the fire in Summerhall. A Targaryen king and his heir died."

"I know by now you can read, _Brother Sandor,_ " Mance found it rewarding to try the Hound's patience. "But I never imagined you brooding over old history scrolls." _I have to unhinge him only a little bit to read Rhaeger's role as he is able to, with no restraint._

"Believe it or not, I had lessons with a maester in my childhood. And those were more interesting than the simpering verses you prefer. The songs are for women, and for the weak."

It didn't work so very well that night. The giant man remained more imperturbable than a sentinel, or an inanimate stone.

"Yet a woman can sometimes be stronger than many a man," Mance said pensively, abandoning his effort of provoking the Hound, fighting to chase the memory of Dalla away from his awareness. _I will live,_ she had told him, long ago, _and if I don't, it will be as I have wanted it. My life for the life of my child. A small thing, in exchange._ Mance was not a kneeler so he would never decide for his woman. She was free to make up her own mind. But lately when he could not sleep he wished he had tied her hands and made her swallow the disgusting tea brewed by the old peasant women south of the Wall. Or that he could steal a child, like Rhaegar did, to give his woman joy. But the old gods would frown at that and the white walkers were never very far away. Mance remembered losing faith fairly early in his childhood. Yet in the dire need, when the cold winds blew, he would fervently hope that he was wrong and that the old gods existed, at the very least.

And that just like the white walkers had woken, they could also be put to sleep.

"So, this thing about the dragons," Sandor Clegane slaughtered the words, one by one, doggedly, the man's curiosity, or perhaps his sigil's acute sense of scent never abandoning the trail. "It is not only Daenerys who wants them. You too. Why?"

Mance wondered if the Hound would have chosen a dog as his animal had he been a warg, or a skinchanger. Mance Rayder, he would have chosen an eagle. Except that the precious gift had never been his, an average son of a land full of wonders, some for good, and many more for evil.

"Once you asked me if I ran when I first met a white walker," he started explaining, more patient than his horse, the best way he knew how. "I told you I did not. We were looking for the fastest way out of the Fangs, Frostfangs as they are called on your maps, passing through a low stony valley, on whose slanted sides the pines evergreen grew high among craggy rock tops covered with never-melting snow. It was a few years after I ran away from the crows who had found me in the wilderness and raised me as one of their own. They taught me to read and they taught me of your customs in the south. There were men from all the Seven Kingdoms among them, the crooks and the unlucky ones in equal measure. I learned about all of them, sharing their fires during the summer nights on the Wall when no wildlings threatened it; for I was not yet their leader.

Anyhow, up in the mountains, I was returning to a large wildling camp with three fellow bear hunters, two men and a woman, all strong and seasoned, not an easy prey. The long summer still reigned beyond the Wall, or it should have been that way. But the snow fell down gently the night before, when we tracked the bear and killed it, painting a white layer all over the valley.

It became cold. Too cold. Our breath froze as it never did and despair took our hearts. I have never felt anything like it before. My companions thought we should make a camp for the night. I didn't trust the cold and I urged them to go on, I swear by the old gods that I did. When they decided against me, I sat next to the fire, poking it to grow stronger with a large stick of wood. When the snow crystals took a form of a terrible wrinkled figure, who killed all three hunters with its blue glistening sword as if they were softer than running water, I stood up to fight it with a burning stick. And I would have died right there because ordinary fire kills the wights, but not the Others.

But the summer storm had been drawing nearer all evening long, showering us with snowflakes mixed with rain. It turned less cold and the creature of ice seemed to waver in its form. A thunder stroke in the blade of a hunting knife of one of my fallen companions right under the monster's feet, setting them ablaze with flames so strong as only the gods could have made them. The walker fell apart, and I was on my living feet among the corpses, armed with a stick. There was nothing left but to burn them before they would return to life. For that wisdom had never been lost on my side of the Wall even when the walkers still slept."

"The songs forbidden in the south by Robert Baratheon speak of dragonfire of old. Of how its power rivalled the lightning sent by the Seven in all their might. Dragonfire could help the North," the Hound rightfully concluded.

Mance was too immersed in his memories to mock him about remembering a verse. "Not the North," he told Sandor Clegane. "The realm of men. For very soon there will be no north and no south. The old oath of the crows will apply, the one they had nearly forgotten: a vow to protect the realm of men. The barrier against the winter of the children of the forest we have seen at the High Heart is strong, and the Wall is standing. But when the winds blow colder still, the Long Night will come. It will cover all of Westeros in darkness."

The conversation was cut short by the incessant humming of the waves of blue silk on their way the godswood.

"The Elder Brother woke them up," Sansa said, excited about the good news, and part shocked at the same time. "Aegon was having a new bed installed in his chambers because they cannot be moved yet. Then a large… a large black something crawled out of the king's fresh linens. Aegon killed it and he said... he said... he hadn't thought to see one of those in Westeros. A manticore, he said."

"And you stayed with him this long to chirp at his pretty face," the Hound said placidly. "A handsome knight for a pretty lady."

"Isn't it wonderful?" Sansa continued with unstoppable eagerness, ignoring him. "That the young squire and Pia are alive..."

"What is a bit less wonderful," Mance observed, "is that someone is keen to end the young king's life very soon, and make it look like his aunt had something to do with it. They have both returned to Westeros from over the water. Lys is one of the Free Cities, and now the foreign creature of Valyria…"

Mance let the players glimpse his growing uncertainty. He would not hide it from people he began to trust. There was little time to finish his errand before someone succeeded in murdering either Aegon or Daenerys in cold blood, the dragonless noble bastard of Ser Arthur Dayne presenting a far more reachable target.

"I must needs ride to Highgarden, tomorrow night at the latest," he said, nervously. "And there is still plenty of reading to be done before the play will be ready."

"I will ride with you, singer," the Hound informed dryly. "It wouldn't do for you to get lost in the south. Who would then make the heads of the pretty ladies swell with pathetic songs just like stables are getting full of horseshit?"

"Maybe you could start playing the high harp," Mance retorted in the same vein. "You might make good coin as a mystery bard in the capital. They seem to be in demand. A singer with a broken voice! Who knows, it could help you bed the woman you want when you are too craven to steal her in the light of day."

"Think of what is in your own breeches, not in mine," the Hound spat venom but he also stopped speaking. _Finally,_ thought Mance, tucking parchment in the players' hands.

He never had time to tell the Hound how the rare scrolls he read as a boy avid for knowledge in the Castle Black, half eaten by mice before they mostly died of cold, also spoke of dragons, and of dragonlords of old. And of the horns they used to bind the dragons to their will, bound in thick rings of red molten gold. There were preciously little writings preserved about the matter and only one thing was clear. Any man or woman who was not the rightful owner of the horn would die a terrible death only from touching it.

"What are we reading tonight?" Sansa's voice rang like a crystal, coloured with innocence and curiosity. "And when will you return from Highgarden? His Grace will not let me join you, I'm afraid."

"Soon," Mance said.

"Aegon's brats will look after you when I am gone... while we are gone," Sandor Clegane said with an unusual change of heart in the middle of the sentence. "They appear to be better than most."

Mance stepped aside and left his characters standing under the tree with a long roll of parchment hanging from their hands. He yet had to find Ser Daven before departing and give him the entire play that had been read so that he could prepare as a new prompter. He would do better than Baelish at any rate. _The brats_ , the Hound's words reminded him of the missing role.  _I also have to talk to the children when I return._ _With the horn._ Returning empty-handed was not a possibility he cared to contemplate. Just like he never contemplated letting the Boltons live, or die with their skin intact, no matter how much the cruelty of what he did burdened him to this day.

 _Some things you have to do, and you regret them for all times,_ he thought, miserably, before forcefully returning his attention to the players.

xxxxxx

"Why ask me to meet you in the godswood, my lord?" Lady Lyanna asked of Rhaegar with a slight hint of confusion.

"You have called me Rhaegar before, my lady," he reproached her.

"I did," she said, "but every time I do so the lid on the box of the unseemly is open for one more inch, and my honour so much the lesser for it.

"Lady Lyanna," the dragon prince said, in a disguise of a large coarse man from the south whose words could still be gentle if he so wished. "We didn't make it to Starfall because the sellswords paid by my father and his Hand have closed all the ways. I don't know for how long you will have to hide in the Reach. The nobles have rebelled against the Targaryen rule. Men tell horrible stories of the fate of your father and your eldest brother. I wish not to believe what they say of my father, of how he took his pleasure in having them tortured and killed. Please, find it in your heart to understand that he has always been cunning. But he only became afraid and willing to strike at _everyone_ who _might_ betray him since he had been held captive in Duskendale. There is only one way to know for sure what has happened. I will have to reveal myself to him and ride to battle soon, if I don't want to see my own house fall into ruin, and my children dead or turned into hostages. There is only one way I could protect you, in the case that I would not return. Even my father wouldn't hurt you then, or so I believe. I thought you would recognise my noble intentions: I heard that you northerners take your vows in front of the heart tree."

"I see," she just said to the rather long account of all his reasons.

"She says that, and she continues to speak in a voice colder than ice," Mance instructed in front of the mute trees. "Like the first day when she believed to be kidnapped by him and expected to be raped."

"Would you take your vows out of duty or out of affection, my lord?" Sansa asked, the tone of her sweet voice frosty and detached.

"I would lay down a vow of fire," Rhaegar's rasp quivered with unmistakable desire, and Mance wondered how Sansa was able to ignore it, or if she simply didn't recognise it for what it was. Then again, they were both good at hiding their real thoughts from all the other kneelers. Mance doubted he would have ever noticed how it was between them it they had not travelled and read together.

Rhaegar repeated the sentence once again, before finding the guts to read on.

"I would lay down a vow of fire,

I would lay down a vow of blood,

I would vow to protect you until my early grave and beyond it.

And if anyone ever harms you on purpose, I would lay upon that man or woman alike, the justice of the First Men, gripping tightly the sharpest blade I could find. I would wield it as a treasure with my arms more used to strike the chords of a harp. The need made the Warrior who he is, they say, and maybe they are right.

I would do all that out of duty, for you have lost your beloved ones on my behalf, at the hands of my father, yes, but his blood runs the same as mine.

I would respect you, from a distance. You would go a maiden to your grave, or you would marry according to your choosing, when the war is over and it is safe to let you go.

The old law still allows the Targaryens to marry twice, just like it allows them to wed brother and sister."

"And I wouldn't accept _any_ of those vows from you," Lyanna said cold-heartedly as the life on Rhaegar's face faded into bleak nothingness. "Do you think that you can break into my life, change it, and than release me to a life which _you_ suppose should be my own?"

"It is the only way," Rhaegar said firmly. "If you accept me, I can command the Kingsguard to protect you when I ride off to war."

"Princess Elia will be your queen. The Kingsguard should protect her. All who know me harbour no doubt that Lyanna Stark can do well in protecting herself."

"It is not the doubt that I harbour in my heart," he said, grey eyes narrowing dangerously under the smooth white mask. Mance liked to imagine that the purple eyes of the real historic Rhaegar, long time dead, would have danced afire like the eyes of a living dragon should, when he finally confessed his love in words, and not only in deeds of utter folly.

"I've never been with any other woman but Elia," the other Rhaegar rasped on. "I loved her tenderly and in peace even when I was not allowed in her bed any longer. The maester said she would die if she carried another child, and there was only one way to prevent that for certain. How easily I could go on to my grave without a woman's body joining mine! There were books to be read, people who needed help, and plenty of wrongs that required attending to in all the Seven Kingdoms. As soon as we had Aegon, I set out to know them all as the future king ought to.

But when I came north and when my eyes wandered all the way to you, I was rewarded with suffering, and yet how I treasured my growing pain!

I silently swore my love to you in the woods of Winterfell, on the battlements of Queensgate, under the dead white tree of the old gods in Raventree and on the tourney grounds of Harrenhal.

Lyanna, I have loved you from the moment I have first seen you."

"You do not quite understand me, my lord," Lyanna spoke, and Sansa spoke with her, both to Rhaegar and to the man reading his role, Mance was certain. The words rolled from her tongue easy and proper, like a bird's flight. "If you truly wish us to exchange vows, I will not have you as my protector."

"As you wish, my lady," he said, bitterly. "Forgive me for daring to propose so unseemly a thing."

"Rhaegar," Lyanna finally pronounced the words that have sealed the fate of many, bottom lip trembling. "The only vow I would accept from you would be a vow of love."

The line came from the incredible tale Mance finally learned in its entirety from Howland Reed, months ago, in the lost marshes of the Neck, in the forsaken bogs where only the lizard lions and the crannogmen could find their way. Lyanna had said it, and Mance would not touch upon it by any elaborate fabrication of his own.

And just like that, with no instruction on the parchment, which lay abandoned on the ground, Rhaegar went on one knee like a proper knight, grasping the lady's ivory hands insistently with his own, in the most chaste of ways, an ideal of courting from the tapestries and the stories. Her eyes were roaming cautiously over his kneeling figure as she continued her confession, the rest of it, that Mance did write, for no one alive knew what Lyanna had said afterwards.

"In my dreams I always see the grief of Princess Elia," Lyanna's voice shook. "And I'm terribly afraid that an affair such as ours should attract the anger of the gods. A maiden to marry a man already wed."

"Yet I would still have you, Rhaegar, as my husband and my man," she answered his vow with her own. "I would not go a maiden to my early grave and I would bear you children if the gods allow. And I would hope we would go to our grave together, in old age, after many winters."

So it was how it came to pass that Rhaegar Targaryen, the Prince of Dragonstone and the Lady Lyanna Stark exchanged their marriage vows, in an unnamed godswood deep in the Reach. No one would ever know in which place it was, to carve a statue, or simply to remember them.

 _Some places are best left unknown,_ Mance thought as he clapped his hands, good for both lute and sword, to wake up the players from their trance. "Very good, done with dignity," he told them. "Off to bed you go. The new day is almost upon us. I'll tell the others about the horn as soon as the sun rises. And at sunset I hope to start riding to Highgarden."

There had been a single spy lurking behind the heart tree all the time. Or the only one Mance could see. He chose not to sharpen his longsword on the spy's neck, considering that most people who had spies in the Red Keep already knew about Lyanna and Rhaegar. And whether they consumed their relationship by marriage or by rape mattered little and less in the game of thrones.

All that the spy would take to his master would be a collection of simpering words, as the Hound rightfully called them, and timid gestures of affection, confirming that Mance's song was what it should have been, an insipid insignificant tale for silly ladies shedding tears for the woes of the characters who lived only on parchment.

**Brienne**

The great Hall of the Guild of Alchemists stood peacefully on the low slope of Visenya's Hill, undisturbed by the autumn rain.

The Guild occupied the space just below the Great Sept of Baelor, not far from the Dragon's Pit and Shae's Manse, where they had left Mance Rayder's gift in chains with the amber- skinned woman who brought it. Brienne tried to forget the destiny Qyburn faced in a brief time Jaime and she succumbed to sleep again. The building was low and wide, following the descent of the hill, guarded by an opulent wooden door.

Mance sought them out in the early hours of the dawn at the fishermen's house, just like Septa Tyene predicted, so Jaime and Brienne went there before the first light to meet the others. Gendry was of an opinion that no metal would be safe enough to hold a horn Daenerys requested when Mance described what it could be like. Most metals would bend or melt under enough heat. And none of them was certain what the horn would do to a person who would dare touch it. Except that it wouldn't be pretty and that it may have something to do with fire. A crude thick iron basin wrought of scraps from the smithies in haste, from which animals would then drink water in the south would do better in Gendry's opinion, but it would also prove way too heavy for any form or carriage. The Elder Brother remembered the studies he had heard about in the Citadel; there were ways to enhance Myrish glass, more famous for making lenses, and to transform it into a substance that could withstand almost any attempt at breaking it, and yet remain unchanged.

As a result, Brienne and the Elder Brother ventured into the Hall of Alchemists in the first hour of the morning, carrying a bag of Lannister gold Jaime's little brother buried in Shae's Manse. Jaime was left to wait and brood on the outside with his only possessions, the candle and the book he retrieved from the fisherfolk, much to his liking. A wanted man, a runaway and a traitor to the new Targaryen rule.

Once more, Brienne didn't know what to think of him. _Of us,_ she thought with irregular warmth spreading in her heart. Whenever she would determine she understood what he expected, his meaning would escape her. When she resigned herself about loving him, and about him desiring her body, unlikely as that had seemed at first, at least until he would be reunited with his sister, his sincere embarrassment and rejection when she suggested she would agree to such a thing puzzled her no end. Brienne was glad that a new quest worthy of pursuing came their way. She imagined the horn, ominous and heavy, bound with gold. As she imagined herself, a true knight, laying it at the feet of Daenerys Targaryen, asking her to spare Jaime's life, and the lives of his children and his sister in return. _Cersei, Myrcella and Tommen did not kill anyone_ , she thought. _Daenerys has to understand._

A quiet man in dark orange robes and restful brown eyes approached them immediately, inquiring of their interests.

"If it please you," Brienne said, "we would need a vessel of improved Myrish glass large enough to contain the greatest war horn designed by human hand."

"We may have what you seek," their host said, careful in his bargaining, "but it is precious to us. It comes at a price of more golden dragons than a modest lady and a servant of the Faith would possess."

"Could we see it, please?" Brienne asked, noticing a veiled woman who crawled after them into the den of the alchemists, hiding an empty wine flagon in the folds of her lavish dress, an effusive fabric of purple, brown and red, unrevealing of her true identity.

"Good man," the new visitor called in a familiar feminine voice, used to being obeyed. "I have brought you another item for my private collection."

"In a moment, my lady," the alchemist, or the seller, decided to ignore her, focusing instead on a strange duo obsessed with horns. "This way," he told them, and they followed through a narrow corridor to a long room where different shapes of glass, panes and lenses, vials and platters, leaned neatly on the walls, the smaller ones safely stored on a range of low shelves. In the corner of the room there were three large containers, standing upright, bigger than wooden wine barrels, even if somewhat narrower.

"One of those should do," Brienne said and the Elder Brother nodded under the cowl.

"Splendid," the alchemist said, "but the price of one would be a purse of hundred golden dragons. They say that the king himself has not such quantity in his treasury, indebted as the Iron Throne is to the Iron Bank of Braavos and to the late Lord of Lannister."

"A hundred, you said," Brienne repeated meticulously, opening the bag of coin. As soon as she sorted out the first golden dragon from the crimson and golden lion pouch, a fury of nails, silk and female hair was at her throat, the sudden onset toppling Brienne to the ground despite her greater physical strength.

Brienne was quickly losing air.

And it was from sheer surprise that the unlikely truth dawned in her honourable mind. Perhaps the simple reason for all Jaime's behaviour towards her might have been that he, too, has grown to love her, in his own way. His kindness piercing a deeper wound in her body's armour than his mockery ever did.

A plea left her lips, "Jaime…"

Serving only to increase the blind rage of her attacker. Brienne's eyelids became heavy. They were about to close when her windpipe went open again, at once. Her lungs widened joyfully, and she had to blink several times to see what saved her.

The Elder Brother held the veiled woman firmly to the ground, his clean long-fingered hands of a healer closed tightly around the woman's neck, as if a force stronger than his own directed his movement to an inevitable conclusion of squeezing out the woman's life. The brown cowl faced the purple veil as a harbinger of certain death.

Brienne stared in disbelief at the show of raw strength in an otherwise peace loving monk. It was worse than when he fought Robert Strong. Uncalled for. Ruthless. "Elder Brother," she called him to his senses. "We had best pay and leave, please!"

The woman balbutiated almost incomprehensively on the ground.

"She robbed it," she said. "She deserves to die. That gold is mine by right, it is mine!"

The woman spoke in throes. "But you are not my valonqar," she said, sounding crazy. "Maggy… She was wrong… She was so wrong in the end…"

Her voice faltered as the air was leaving her body. "My valonqar," she whispered, admitting defeat, "the prophecy… Maggy…"

"Elder Brother!" Brienne cried out and finally stood up to take action and overpower the monk before he would murder the woman in cold blood.

Her effort was wasted for the woman's last words woke up the servant of the Seven from his state of affliction. Shaking, he released his almost victim. He stood two steps away from her and stated, as if he was affirming a certainty learned with great pain:

"The prophecies, the foretelling of fate, they are all lies, the ultimate deceit for the weakness of the human heart. We choose to make our own destiny. That is how the gods have made us. Free to decide what we will do, and not bound by the doom foreseen."

The alchemist cowered in the corner all that time, next to the three long barrels of glass. He hurried to accept Brienne's coin and send his strange customers out. It wouldn't do if they would break all the expensive artefacts in their wrath.

The huge glass jar was surprisingly easy to carry despite its size, a gracious empty casing of low weight. Brienne thought it beautiful as she held it to her chest, with great caution. Soon they were in the streets with Jaime, the crazy woman forgotten behind them.

"How did it go?" Jaime asked.

"Good," Brienne told him, leaving to the Elder Brother to explain more if he so wanted. But the monk kept silent and to himself.

"Let's find some horses now," Jaime said, his commanding spirit back with the light of the day, and a new task at hand. He cheerfully guided them to a place where in his opinion the best horses in the capital were sold, pretending to illuminate their way with the purple glare of a burning glass candle.

xxxxxxx

 _Shae's Manse,_ Mance thought, wondering who Shae was, standing in front of the door of the inconspicuous city house near the walls, where Brienne and Jaime had brought him.

They didn't tell him what to expect, they just exchanged confused glances, one blue, and the other green. A single look when he opened the door told it all, more telling than any words.

A lifeless body of a black-haired man in dark robes hung from the chain made of many different metals, high up from the ceiling, attached to a hook that could be used to support a carcass of a deer being cut into parts for cooking. It looked like his dying had not been pleasant.

The bothersome quick-tempered septa paced back and forth near the hearth. The head of Ser Bonifer Hasty watched the King-beyond-the-Wall, from the powerful body which was not Ser Bonifer's, never his to start with, never burnt as it should have been, on a leash wrought of chains which was not his. A cry of outrage to the broad skies above.

"He should have been burnt," he stated, silently, "the knight of your Faith of crystals and lamps, not turned into a monster."

It was the only sacred thing in common to all the free folk beyond the Wall, from the organised Thenns to the unruly but sensitive giants. Even for those who inhabited the coasts facing Skagos, and on whose eating habits Mance didn't want to dwell. In the real north you burned your dead friends and enemies alike. Even the crows.

"They are both dead already," the septa said practically, holding the monster's chain. "Why should you die too if you can use this creature to do Daenerys' bidding?"

"It is for me to choose what I want to die for," Mance said, "not for you, nor for anyone, to decide."

The cold rage rose in the pit of his stomach like when he had single-handedly gutted one of the former Magnars of Thenn for needlessly maiming some of his own people. Those who wanted to follow Mance could keep to their customs, eat shit or the flesh of the dead if they so wanted, but no fighting among the living, or unnecessary cruelty, was allowed. The stupid woman had no idea what she did and what could happen to the dead unburned when the cold gale from the Wall would strike all the lands.

"In my home," he said, willing to offend her, as she did him with her meddling, "the unattended corpses spring to life. Have you seen them, septa? Or are you not a septa, but what you kneelers call a whore, waiting for a wealthy guest? Should I pay you, or would you do it willingly? Should I pay you more if I am rough in taking my pleasure? I heard that in your brothels they charge more to men from faraway lands with foreign tastes…"

"My name is Tyene," she said, black-looking eyes ablaze with inner thunder, "and I will lay with whom I will."

After that, she eyed him as if he was a sweet pie served after dinner on the king's table, a treat she would gladly consume. With curiosity and meaningless pleasure.

"You are nobody to me," he told her, humiliated, with cold certainty, "do you understand?"

"And who, pray, are you?" she exclaimed. "I will burn this one if you so will!" she said pointing at the hanged man. "It was him who made Ser Robert Strong! What is done is done, and now it can be of use. Have _you_ burned every corpse that you ever made in the place you are coming from? Was there not a single one that you just left to rot in the sand?"

Mance turned his back on the woman, her pet monster, and the hanging corpse, unhinged by her words more than he expected. Provoking the Hound to bite came back tenfold, and the King-beyond-the-Wall longed to grunt like a wild boar. Memories he buried deep, too deep, whirled in his mind like a snow storm. The real Lyanna, short, hair colour of ash, and already beautiful; a little girl who visited the Wall, and to whom a young crow apprentice, not much older than herself, gifted an obsidian dagger he had carved to be sharp, hitting stone with stone during the solitary nights in his small room, glowing blue from ice hanging from the window frame. Mance often wondered what had happened to the knife he had given her. He liked to imagine she took it with her when her destiny led her to Dorne. Then there were Lyanna's brothers, the fierce one who died bravely, the long faced self-righteous one for whom Mance sang in Winterfell, even more brave in his own silent right, as the King-beyond-the-Wall had a chance to learn only much, much later. And finally the younger brother, the youngest one… who took the black and went to the Wall. And Jon, Mance's friend, whom he would have killed if he didn't listen to Tormund Giantsbane for the first time in his life.

All the Starks he met were better people than him, Mance Rayder, a wildling, and a wicked bastard. A man who once thought he could do what needed to be done. A man who had learned better.

Some things you did, and you could not undo them. And they haunted you forever.

"In the snow," he confessed, exposed as he rarely would allow himself to be, "some people I killed, I have left them to rot in the snow… Had no strength to burn them, even knowing that I should…"

The woman touched his shoulder in an odd gesture of approval, and it was the last thing that she should have done. In a second, he had her pinned on the floor. Bringing her down as far away from the dead as possible the only concession granted to gentleness. The headdress of the septa fell first, revealing long raven dyed hair, and skin so dark and amber as he had never seen before. _Dornish,_ he remembered. Ripping the rest of the dress came as natural as skinning a bear. Her body shone like amber in all places, unblemished and younger than his own. But he was too far gone to notice her youth, and to step back, yanked off his inner limits by the flood of his regrets.

"You asked for this," he told her. "You wanted this before and I denied you. This is what it would be like if I would steal you," he lied.

The monster yawned in the corner, staring peacefully, despite that no one held its chain.

The woman didn't quail, just pushed her hips up towards him in a way that left no doubt about her wishes. She didn't know what was coming her way.

He did it immediately, just like some of his wildlings would copulate with any wild or domestic four-legged animal when the need was great, the women scarce, and the other man were not looking. There was no _proper_ beginning, and there would be no good end. Only a forced connection, the violent emptying of his body. Her hips surged up again, responding. An illusion that she might have found joy in it, despite all, crossed his clouded judgement, making him finish everything sooner than a young boy would.

He pushed her away like a rag, towards the monster she had made _for him_ , and snarled the words he did not mean at all, "Keep your creature, burn it, or gift it to someone else. I will not have anything more to do with it, or with you. Others take you!"

Rejection was easy, and weakness something he could not afford. Not before the mummery played out, to whatever end.

With that he pushed the door wide open and ran into the streets, relieved and ashamed of what he had done in too great a measure. He wouldn't turn back, but he still heard her, somewhere on the inside: huddled, hurt, weeping, begging for him to leave, or for him to come back.

He would saddle his horse and go. The horn to bind dragons was waiting.


	33. The Silly Hearts of Women

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where women talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for Baelish and everything his behaviour towards Sansa usually entails.

**Sansa**

Sansa carefully opened the not so heavy door leading to Septa Lemore's chambers in the Red Keep. Her own was heavier, dark wood reinforced by iron, almost as if the chambers she had been graciously allowed to use were built with a dungeon cell in the carpenter's mind. She had asked King Aegon for permission to see his special prisoner, and he approved. "I will also come and speak to her later," Aegon told Sansa. "Do tell her that."

The Hound left Sansa after the midday meal was served. His absence turned immediately bothersome, and the last late summer blueberries served for desert bitter, in a way she could not entirely explain. _He will come back, he told me so,_ she tried to tell herself.

The truth was he did not.

 _He never makes any vows,_ Sansa remembered, _well_ , _not without the weirwood mask if truth be told._ She patted the object she had grown to treasure in the side pocket of a thick travelling attire she donned as soon as she was alone. _He said, Aegon's young guards will look after you when I am gone,_ she recalled, and one possibility of what he meant made her cold all over, despite the warm dress she wore.

The company of Gendry, the latest member of the Kingsguard, and Nymeria, was somehow inappropriate _. Insufficient._ It occurred to Sansa, dressed for travelling for no reason at all, that it might be pleasing to have a cup of tea with the ladies, but which ladies was another matter. The company of Lady Margaery or Lady Olenna was not very inviting. The kind septa who raised Aegon seemed like a safe choice, and maybe, maybe if Sansa was lucky she would even have some words of comfort, from the seven faces of one god, to restore a semblance of peace in Sansa's bouncing heart.

Much to Sansa's misfortune and disappointment, Septa Lemore was not alone. She was already having tea with Septa Tyene. Or rather, she was pouring boiling water over a set of strongly smelling herbs in a large tea cup in front of the younger septa. The word stink came to Sansa's mind but it was not the proper word, not even for the thoughts, and much less for the tongue of a lady. The entire room was soon _smelly_ and Sansa's belly turned all tender from it.

The chambers were well furnished and spacious, with as much golden light as the autumn could still offer. Aegon did not spare an effort for the septa he regarded as a mother, in a little time they had both occupied the royal palace on the hill of his famous namesake, Aegon the Conqueror.

"Tansy," Septa Tyene sniffed the fumes and confirmed her finding wryly, sitting way too upright in a carved wooden chair, where a stag devoured a dragon under her, and behind her black clad back... It boded well, in Sansa's opinion, that Septa Lemore was open minded enough not to mind treacherous furniture.

"Thank you, Ash... Lemore," the younger septa exhaled with relief, eyeing Sansa with suspicion. "It gladdens my heart that you could still find it with the change of seasons."

"May I join you for a cup of tea?" Sansa inquired shyly, blushing immediately when both septas gave her a bewildered look, almost on the verge of laughing.

"Surely, my lady," Septa Lemore managed to utter, "you are familiar with this special brew you are asking for? You have reason to look after _some_ aspects of your health?"

"I do not," Sansa said, "but it would seem only polite to accompany you in your conversation."

"This is used for a peculiar ailment of a woman's body, my lady," explained Septa Lemore, steadily in control of her will to giggle, visible on the edges of her dark purple eyes. "The Seven blessed me with inner peace so I never had to drink it since I became a septa, but Septa Tyene is less lucky. She had not yet had time to inform me of how her illness came to pass this time and what... was its cause."

The condition of Septa Tyene was seemingly another source of the older septa's amusement while the quaint violet eyes of their host studied both of her guests.

"Lemore," Septa Tyene spoke slowly, struggling against an invisible foe who must have made it incredibly difficult for her to speak. "It was... it was..."

And no words came. Only the rustle of black folds nesting up and down restlessly on the chair, her behind now on the top of the stag, and now on the top of the dragon.

Being seated appeared not to be pleasing for the younger septa at all.

"Shouldn't you lay down?" Septa Lemore asked, slightly worried, her joy exhausted in a moment.

"No, Lemore, thank you," the younger septa declined politely, sipping her tea. The taste apparently matched the strong odour because her dark-skinned face wrinkled in disgust. "It was different, this time," she succeeded in saying something about her illness, at last.

"Not what you thought? An unprovoked attack?" Septa Lemore asked with interest, when it finally dawned on Sansa that they have not been discussing health at all.

"Yes, and no," Septa Tyene said softly. "It was like a desert storm fever that drains you, such as I have never lived through before. And the only thing that it left me with was a taste of what it could have been. In a different place and in different time. And had I been a different woman."

She downed more of her tea, lips narrowing with a line of sadness, cup rising higher, revealing dark spots on her wrists.

"Tyene!" Septa Lemore exclaimed with emotion. "You should use a bath. I insist! It will do you good." Sansa stood to leave but the kind septa stopped her: "Lady Sansa, please, do stay another moment, we could use a woman's help." Sansa experienced a strong contentment in being called a woman, not a girl, while Septa Lemore called Ned Dayne, on guard in front of her chambers. The bath was brought in no time. Sansa noticed how Tyene truly needed their help to undress and step in the tub, gingerly. Her _illness_ seemed to have laid heavy on her.

When Septa Tyene finally sank in warm water, Sansa was stunned with the sight of other marks on her agile golden brown coloured body. Some of them reminded Sansa of her own bruises when Joffrey ordered her beaten, in another age of the world. So much had changed since then, that Sansa had almost forgotten about Joffrey. _Almost. At least the destiny does not betray only the honourable,_ Sansa thought. I _t plays tricks on everyone, honest or evil._ Septa Tyene looked as the courtiers gossiped that Lolys Stockworth did, when she had returned home after the mob raped her, even less witty than before. A careful look at the robes discarded on the floor told Sansa that the sober dress of the Faith was jabbed at the edges, torn and damaged, and hastily assembled together to keep up the appearance of propriety. There were odd sticky stains on parts of the garments, and Sansa did not wish to know what they were. She was certain that whatever misfortune struck Septa Tyene must not have been pretty.

"It is crazy," Tyene whispered, "and utterly silly..." She stretched slowly in too hot water with difficulty. "But I wish it could be done again. Not as it was, but with more... more... . "

"Time?" Lemore suggested.

"That is only one word," Tyene smiled sharply, wandering in her thoughts.

"Care?"

"That is for you, not for me, Lemore," Tyene refuted the notion.

"Oh, Tyene, you must suspect there is more to the folly of the senses than what you have been willing to admit…" Lemore said abandoning all pretences.

"Love is an illness," Sansa said, not knowing where the words surged from. "Queen Cersei said it was a poison, sweet, but deadly all the same. Pray, Septa Tyene, if your ailment was but a man, just for the sake of make-believe, what would you want from him?"

"Everything he could give me," Tyene answered immediately, black eyes honest and shining.

 _She bedded a man, he hurt her, and she wants him to hurt her again,_ Sansa rightfully concluded, wondering who the man was, at loss to understand why any woman would want so violent a thing to occur again. It was one thing to accept such out of duty to one's lord husband but another one to long for it, willingly. Miranda Royce wanted her lovers to please her, not hurt her. _Would I be like this if Sandor bedded me? He is stronger than most men._ They slept apart the night before in the Red Keep, Sansa in a too big empty bed with dusty curtains, and Sandor in a too small one in the adjacent chamber... _And now he is gone, and I am left to wait for him to return._

 _What if Petyr bedded me?_ The thought of the latter filled her with repudiation. Sansa shivered and recoiled from the tub.

"Tyene," Septa Lemore said, seriously, "you mean it."

"I do. Everything he could give me, and more," the bathing septa repeated.

Sobs fell upon her out of nowhere, and the bath water mingled with Tyene's tears.

Sansa gently raised Tyene's head on the edge of the tub, and removed patches of wet black hair from her sticky cheeks. Her fingers became coloured. Septa Tyene was obviously dying her hair, just like Sansa did, not so long ago.

"Is it always this way?" Sansa asked Septa Lemore, brazenly. "This illness?" _They are septas!_ she thought, _They cannot bed men._ Then again, the kings and their knights were also not supposed to harm women, yet it frequently came to pass in the light of the Seven. Why should it be any different with other things one was taught to expect?

"It is different for everyone," the sincere answer flew her way, "Tyene is not new to it. She knows about this illness and its treatment."

 _She was not a maid, despite being a septa,_ Sansa read through the words and suppressed a sound of further disapproval. "And if you don't?" Sansa continued, "Know, I mean. What do you do when the attack of this _plague_ is upon you out of your own choice to suffer it, and you wish for it to end well. Do you fight it?"

"You don't," septa Lemore said, "it is like a sea in which you plunge, and you dive, and you get lost, but you never drown. And it washes you away before it brings you back to the shore, changed. Alive. New to the world and the greatness there sometimes is in it, if only too well hidden behind so much pain."

 _She is not a maid either by the sound of it,_ Sansa thought and admonished herself for being reproachful. A woman could become a septa as a widow. There was nothing shameful in that. Yet Lemore's words of the act of a man and woman together, far less detailed than what she was used to hear in the Vale, tickled her curiosity more than Miranda's favourite discussion concerning the properties and the feats that could be achieved by manhoods.

"Lemore," Tyene sighed from the water, tears drying, body finally relaxed, dark eyes larger than ever, "I never agreed with you on this, but it may well be that you are not so wrong."

"What made you change your mind?" her friend asked.

"It was terrible, Lemore. Terrible! Before, and after. Like when as a child you open the room where your parents have hidden a present for your name day. It is almost within your reach. But then the door is closed, and you can never find it again, nor your present. Or if you see the door, you can never open it again. You know it is possible, you know it exists, but it will never be for you. And maybe someone else will enter behind and find your lost treasure. Such is my ailment now."

"Was the cause of your illness brought to the capital from Dorne?" Sansa asked cautiously, curious, if unwilling to add to Tyene's discomfort.

"The cause of it is new to me and to this land," Tyene confessed.

"From across the sea then," Sansa thought of Aegon. The young king was handsome but maybe he also ordered his guards to rape women.

The explanation came from Septa Lemore. "No, Lady _Stark._ It descended to the capital with the winter, flying on the wings some of us can only dream about, disturbing the strings of a lute, or maybe riding a sturdy brown horse. Is that not so, Tyene?"

 _Mance Rayder?_ Sansa was profoundly shocked. _He wouldn't do it! He is kind and brave and fond of songs!_

But Tyene's bruises spoke differently when she kept confessing.

"Lemore," she said, "I never believed you on another matter, that it could happen to _me_ that I should feel for someone else's pain."

"Compassion," Septa Lemore professed, knowingly. "By it we are lost. The most dangerous and twisted way to a woman's heart. We can sincerely uphold the virtue in almost everything, and then be conquered by allowing the misery of others to touch our being. Such is the way of love, to walk in on us through the back door."

"Shall I look for a clean set of clothing?" Sansa offered to do something, eager to run away from Septa Lemore's words. They reminded her too much of the Hound. She was afraid _for him_ almost ever since she met him. Even when she was in love with Joffrey.

She took the absence of an answer as a yes. Septa Lemore's wardrobe was a miracle of sorts, a stockpile of dresses from all lands. The likes of some Sansa had never seen, smelling foreign beyond count. Several pairs of heightened shoes adorned the bottom. She took out a clean set of septa robes, but Lemore already stood silently behind her and robbed her of them, pointing persistently at the heavy costume of a silent sister in one of the corners.

"War is upon Highgarden," the older septa commented aloud as if she had spoken about the weather. "The silent sisters will depart in the evening to tend to the unfortunate dead, haven't you heard, Tyene? May the Seven bless their holy work!"

"Lemore, hold your tongue," Tyene objected. "What use is explaining what the Faith does? The lady here is not one of us."

Sansa gratefully pressed the robes of a silent sister to her chest and bowed instead of thanking to the violet-eyed septa.

"Indeed, I am not a septa," she said. "And with your permission, septas, I will now take my leave."

But before she left, she stood on the doorway for a moment and spoke, accidentally, as if she was telling a story to herself: "I heard a bard singing a new song, of a heart of a man who only ever knew winter. It had run away from him and it has gone to Oldtown so that he could not find it any more. But another man, one to be recognised as a fat crow, may know where his heart dwells. It's a very beautiful rhyme, septas, you should listen to it when your holy duties allow."

Lemore gave her a nod of stern approval, _proud_ of Sansa for some reason, while Tyene blushed almost green from embarrassment all over her darkened face. "I didn't mean..." she said. "When I said..."

"But you did," Sansa retorted, a voice colder than her father's when he acted a lord. "I am a wolf with no pack, or a fish on dry land. I do not wish that on anyone. I do not wish for you to know what I have become. Such were my parting words to you, Tyene, and I ask for no service in return. Do with them what you will."

xxxxx

Sansa's second tea that afternoon was a much less pleasant and more subdued affair than the first one, Tyene's lack of faith notwithstanding. The shrewd eyes of Lady Olenna Tyrell studied Sansa's woollen dress and a closed bundle she carried, while Margaery pretended to stitch and look a proper widow in the back of her grandmothers' lofty chambers. Not so long ago, Sansa would have believed the genuine elegance of her posture. But that girl had descended a sharp flight of stairs after Joffrey's wedding, spurted wings and disappeared on a ship which would not take her to safety.

"Lady Stark," Lady Olenna said, "it is a pleasure to see you again so soon after yesterday's dinner."

 _Everyone omits to call me Lady Lannister,_ Sansa thought.  _The name has lost its appeal these days._ She didn't know how she should feel about it. _The Faith will remember_ , she mused. And the High Septon did not appear to be either forgetful, or forgiving.

"I felt obliged to pay my respects before the tragic events may force you to return to Highgarden, my lady. The words of war are on everyone's lips. I feel for your trouble and that of your people."

"Men exaggerate," Margaery offered from the background. "My brothers are very brave. They will prevail over the enemy as they have done before."

"I hope that they do that," Sansa said, wondering how best to find out when the silent sisters were departing and from where. "If you could suggest me an appropriate way, I would like to send some medicines or other useful gifts."

"My dear," Olenna said, amused, "your lands are far away and your resources scarce, how would you pay for that?"

Sansa blushed and lost the gift of speech. The truth was she didn't even think that far.

"Listen to me, dear," Olenna continued straightforwardly, in a tone of a good-natured grandmother, but her repeated calling Sansa _dear_ sounded even less courteous than when she was being called a girl. And what Lady Tyrell proposed was the worst of all, if not unexpected to be heard of, again. "The best we could do for you is to marry you to Willas now. His wealth as the heir of Highgarden would be enough for both of you. He would accept you even as a used good."

Sansa's blood boiled slaying her shame. _Maybe I have courage after all,_ she thought being afraid of Lady Olenna all the while. _Or I have spent too much time with Nymeria in the wood, and too little sipping tea with the ladies?_ she considered the possibility.

The old, wise and friendly Lady Olenna suddenly turned into an old hag bargaining for Sansa's maidenhead, offering her, what exactly, in exchange? A crippled grandson who will soon be heir to nothing if the rumours of the one-eyed man who led the invasion of the Reach were true at least in part. _The winter will make beggars of us all,_ Sansa thought, straightening her neck as, long ago, she would see her mother do when the proud Lady Catelyn would see off an inopportune guest. _I can find out from servants about the silent sisters departing. If there is anything that this castle has never lacked, it is rumours._

"I am honoured by your kind consideration, Lady Olenna," Sansa said. "For gently allowing the possibility to join the blood of my house to yours."

"Old blood is worth little in itself, my dear," Lady Olenna still did not quite understand. Sansa, the girl just flowered, who would have gladly married Willas and bore him sons called Eddard and Brandon, had gone away with Petyr Baelish one night, and she had never come back.

"Indeed, my lady," Sansa said, "you took the words from my mouth. Lord Willas should propose to a Frey. They have lands and riches now to give their blood a better colour. Or to a daughter of Lord Bolton, Warden of the North, if his wife bears him one."

"Lady Walda is pregnant?" Lady Olenna asked with renewed interest.

"Alas for the poor widow, Lady Walda, worthy of her weight in gold," Sansa said sweetly, recalling everything Mance had told her about the changes in the north when the rest of their companions slept in the woods not far from Harrenhal. "They say that a host of wildlings conquered Winterfell, skinning Lord Bolton and his heir. Imagine only, to flay the flayed men. So cruel and against the king's laws."

"Have you had ravens on that?"

"Why should I need a raven?" Sansa's words poured out of her like golden wine sweetened with poison. "Men talked of how I murdered King Joffrey on his wedding night and grew wings to run away. They whispered that the Starks had strange powers. Haven't you heard, Lady Olenna? Of wargs and skinchangers in the north…"

"My dear," Lady Olenna said with pity, her face changing from interest to consideration that Sansa may have lost her mind. "I only ever had your best interests at heart."

"Of course you did, Lady Olenna," Sansa said. "Especially when you plucked a single fruit from a net of amethysts I wore in my hair, one night in the middle of the long summer. The bards will sing of that for many lives to come. And I have so befriended one. Also Joffrey's real father is still alive, and free. He may want to know the truth."

"The Kingslayer will not live long," Olenna exclaimed, shrewdness back in her eyes.

"Maybe just long enough to pay you or Lady Margaery a visit," Sansa said, noticing with satisfaction how Margaery's next stitch turned more crooked than Arya's needlework ever was. _So she knows, too._

"Lady Sansa," Lady Olenna admitted with newly found respect, "do forget my hasty words from before. My grandson, Willas, would be more than honoured to have you as his wife."

"Before some time," Sansa said, "I too would have been honoured with your proposal."

"After your stay with Lord Baelish, you can hardly speak of honour," Lady Margaery commented lightly, and Sansa decided to ignore her, all her attention on her grandmother.

"I thank you for your kind offer, Lady Olenna," she judged, "but I could not longer bear to dilute the blood of your noble house of stewards with my own of the Kings of Winter, only eight thousand years old, and ruling over half of Westeros. It might yet ruin the freshness of your very recent lordship. Alas, I value the good name of your house too much to impinge such a punishment on you even if what you ask of me is very small a thing, to give my hand to a crippled heir of a small land in the south, which may soon no longer be his, and where the crops will die with the arrival of the winter."

They had nothing to say to that. Sansa was pleased, but her soul ached tremendously from the wickedness of others, and from the new harshness she had been forced to find in herself. The godswood appeared like the only safe place to go next, hoping that the old gods could provide her with guidance and peace.

Red dragon's breath grew high under the old oak in the time that Sansa was away from King's Landing. _The dragons have returned,_ she thought, _why couldn't the wolves return as well?_

"Help me," she prayed aloud, "tell me what do do."

She should have known better than to hope for anything.

"My beautiful daughter," a voice spoke behind her, icing the red liquid in Sansa's veins, almost stopping its natural flood.

She stood up but there was nowhere to go. Sansa was trapped. _Stupid,_ she cursed herself. _Of course it is not safe to be in the godswood. That's where you met Ser Dontos, and he worked with Petyr. There is no place where you can be secure._

The breath full of mint drew closer, more suffocating than the acrid fumes of Tyene's tea. Sansa backed to the heart tree as Petyr's only hand held a dagger pressed to her belly. The steel was sharp, and she could not move.

"There are only two ways out of this for you, sweetling," he said. "Either you will obediently take my hand, leave the Red Keep and travel back to Harrenhal with my faithful guards, or the brave young knights of King Aegon will found the crimson of your blood mixed with the redness of this grass.

 _My aunt Lyanna would have known what to do,_ Sansa thought. _Arya would know. Nymeria could kill him._

But her aunt was dead, Arya lost, and Nymeria was not there. And even her aunt had needed Prince Rhaegar to save her from his father.

There was only Sansa.

She tried to remember Petyr's own lessons in the game of thrones. _Confuse them,_ she thought. _Confuse him._

The path back to the serpentine stairs loomed open behind Petyr, fluttering with the breeze of liberty, and she still had the robes of the silent sister in her hands stiff with apprehension.

"Father," she tried saying, and he observed her new humility with utmost suspicion.

"Sweetling," he said, "your kindness will not serve you this time. There is no one who can help you now. Understand that."

"Petyr," she continued just to say something, in a voice thick with fear. "If I go to Harrenhal, would you take me to wife?"

"Only if you are a very good girl and deserve it," he said in his false tone of concern, as a good honest father admonishing a naughty ungrateful child. "Robin Arryn is alive. Aegon doesn't want you and Daenerys is a woman. The Boltons are dead and through you I could still rule the north. But I could just as well kill you and inherit the north as a widower of your aunt Lysa."

Sansa was amazed. She took a deep breath and focused on a way out behind Petyr's back.

"Petyr," she said, trying to remember with precision the hateful coarse words of the man who might have been riding to Highgarden by that time. "You see, it is not that I would not want to be obedient and thankful. Some things have been done to me that you are not aware of."

The slightest look of question on his face bid her continue. _I know everything about everyone,_ his eyes affirmed, but there was doubt in the corner of his lips.

"There was a man," she said, willing her voice stern like her father's when he would sentence a man to die. She suddenly saw him, in her mind, cleaning his sword after a beheading he was forced to carry out, in the dark grove of the old gods in Winterfell.

There was wind in the red dragon's breath, bending it to its will.

The small cut in the stomach would heal, and going to Harrenhal seemed worse than dying. Being Alayne again. Being what others wanted after she was allowed to be herself for weeks.

"This man was very strong, Petyr," she spoke with the voice of Lord Eddard Stark, watching the face of _Lord_ Baelish for reaction. "One night," she thought hard until she could repeat all the ugly words as they were, one by one, "he buried his cock in my cunt and he kept on doing it until I screamed..."

The eyes of the mocking bird blinked for an instant, and it had to be enough. It would be her only chance.

Sansa yanked the dagger away, posing a bundle she carried between her tummy and Petyr, feeling blood trickle from the gash the knife still made in her stomach and the fabric of her dress.

If he had two arms, Petyr might have caught her. But thanks to Nymeria, he only had one. Sansa lifted her skirts high and ran on the path and down the stairs as she never did before. She didn't stop running until she was out in the open, in front of Maegor's Holdfast, and there, as if sent by the Seven, by the old gods, or the ghost of her father wandering the keep, were carriages and horses, and the silent sisters gathering to travel to the Reach. The crowd was dense and noisy.

She cowered behind a large wagon still waiting for its horses to be found and pulled the bundle she was carrying away from her stomach, studying the cut under it. It was not deep. She tore both sleeves from her dress in haste. They were widening below the elbow. She used one to press the wound to stop the bleeding as she had seen the Elder Brother do when Gendry's stomach was all spilled out, and used the other one to tie the bandage tightly around her waist. The borrowed robes of the silent sister fitted her perfectly and the stain of drying blood they soaked in on one place melted conveniently in the darkness of the fabric. _What will be the last mask I will wear?_ she wondered, not knowing the answer.

She was not even the last silent sister in one of the carriages. Before sunset they were ready to go. Sansa was happy to notice that neither Lady Olenna nor Lady Margaery used the opportunity to leave the capital.

_Either the situation in Highgarden is so bad that they are afraid to go home, or they still believe Aegon will marry Margaery._

Somehow she could not believe that the latter would ever happen. _Margaery,_ she thought ludicrously, _you may yet die a maid, at least in the eyes of the people and the High Septon._

Sansa wondered how many lovers Margaery had had and if she loved any of them. Her thoughts roamed further imagining what Lady Olenna must have done in her youth, having a husband or not.

 _The sea that washes you away,_ she remembered the image Septa Lemore painted for her. What she had said was almost as beautiful as the songs Sansa loved so well, yet also somehow real. Charged with promise and premonition.

She wished there were cruel arms around her waist in place of the fattest and the heaviest double set of robes she had worn in her life.

 _I will find you,_ she thought. _And when I do, I will no longer be a maid._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the author's favourite chapters in this story


	34. The Siege of Highgarden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the mummers travel farther

**Jaime**

Jaime was slowly but never less certainly approaching the edge of madness when they finally caught sight of Highgarden, manse and pretty on the green banks of Mander. The river meandered lazily, washing clean the lower turrets of the foremost city walls, disappearing in the hazy distance of a lonely green horizon, greying quietly with the deepening of the sunset.

They had reached the fertile lands feeding Westeros, with orchards still ripe with the last fruit of the season. The fields of golden roses surrounded the capital of the Reach like low thorny walls, unequalled in their splendour in all of the Seven Kingdoms.

During their journey, of four men, and one woman, Jaime, the Kingslayer, the betrayer, the cripple, was unwillingly and mutely appointed the Lord Commander of the incomplete company of mummers, on their way to meet the unknown.

The Elder Brother would ride in silence of the gods, staring at his long fingered hands, scratching his bald head from under the cowl he would never take off any more, as if a new mood of severe penitence had descended upon him for no reason at all. Occasionally he would squeeze his own neck and shake his head violently, bowing under pressure of an invisible grievance.

The wildling king would not part from his lute, and the song he played to himself was in a language no one understood, sweet and remote. When Brienne tried asking what it was, to see if he would stop, rather than to make him continue, he murmured that the language was that of the giants, and a song the one a male would sing if he was getting of a mind to steal a female. Brienne was then intrigued to hear it in Common Tongue _(like any woman would be,_ Jaime thought, utterly endeared) _,_ but the singer would not render it, turning to his humming in gibberish as soon as he was no longer in the centre of anyone's interest. Or worse, he would pull out the parchment and the quill, and start scribbling with great urgency and practiced art, throwing furtive glances at Brienne or at Jaime. It didn't take much wisdom to figure that Ser Arthur Dayne would make another appearance in the show, and rather soon at that. Jaime was not looking forward to that part of their journey at all. _Maybe Others will manage to take me before the next reading,_ he thought, doubting for some reason that he would be that lucky. _They wouldn't want me in the seven hells,_ he mused peacefully.

The Hound was grim and kept as far away from the wagon as he could, a menacing figure on his black horse at the rear of the company, seemingly undecided if he should turn craven as he did once before, and speed back. Jaime could not blame him. The wagon after all contained an expensive holder of Myrish glass, _and_ his not quite dead brother, cheerful and smiling, a proper Warrior's Son, wielding a shiny sword inlaid with the crystals of the Faith. In more suited words, a nameless monster chained to the axe between the wheels of the wagon, the same one that came to the capital from the Quiet Isle. As long as Gregor was calm, he would be safe. But if he would move, the wagon would move too, horses or not, and smash him into nothingness (so Jaime hoped, when he devised the plan to carry Gregor safely to the Reach), or at least hamper his onset, until they would think of something to do.

They had found Gregor smiling with Ser Bonifer's lips in the house of the whore mistress whom Tyrion had murdered. The dead knight was abandoned and alone next to the hastily built funeral pyre in front of the hearth that smelled indistinctly of Qyburn, or of some of the ointments he used to heal Jaime's stump. The scene flooded Jaime with such immense guilt that he could not simply have left Gregor behind no matter what was the opinion of anyone else on that ticklish matter. Not because Jaime believed the new Gregor could, or should, be put to any use, but because it was his father who let Gregor become what he was, and he, Jaime, had never had the guts to object to father's methods. Maybe if he did, he would still have both hands, and Ser Gregor would not be followed by the Bloody Mummers in the killing service of Lord Tywin.

Burning Gregor alive as Mance strongly suggested was a highly appealing solution until Jaime remembered that the life force of the creature was inseparable from the black glass candle. And that one, most unfortunately, kept burning merrily, despite the cold weather and the trotting of the wagon, illuminating the still virgin part on Jaime in the White Book of the Kingsguard in ugly tones of purple and dark red.

And the most humiliating detail was that Jaime's new horse was white as snow, in sick mimicry of the innocence and the sacred vows he had forsaken so long ago that he could not even remember with clarity the way he was, the way he must have been, before Aerys and before he loved Cersei more than a brother should.

But above all, and far, far more than about anyone or anything else, Jaime was worried about Brienne. She wore a look she had when they first met, of stubborn determination to bring Jaime to King's Landing, or to find Lady Sansa, or some other such insane brave thing a trusted someone else had conferred upon her to do, naturally, in the name of the knightly honour. He would give anything to know what she was up to this time, but she wouldn't confide it him, not about her intentions. Not even when he would sleep next to her every night, a habit none of them challenged, even if both of them were way too embarrassed to come truly close, with the others sharing the same ground and the same cold air only a few steps away.

Jaime had led them south and west by the surest route, paid attention that everyone helped with cooking and then ate their meals, slept and trained in turns. Even the Elder Brother would join the training effort with his bastard lance, the tip somewhat jagged after his duel with Gregor, head neatly covered. He would wield it in his left arm, and Jaime, still half clumsy with his only hand, envied the grace and the ease with which the older man handled his new weapon.

"I thought you were done with violence," the Hound mocked the monk who only stated, wisely, not reacting to the bite. "You never know what the gods can bring before you. The High Septon had armed the Faith so I can be armed just as well, even if I still do not share his new belief, and your old one, brother, that it is the sharp steel and the strong arms that rule this world."

"What rules it then?" the Hound asked, idly.

"Misfortune, it would seem, in most cases," the monk replied after some thought. "But we have to forget that and do what is right. There is no other way."

"What is right?" Sandor Clegane asked, angrily at that time, not expecting any answer. He rode swiftly back to the end of the column, having had enough of _brotherly_ conversation.

Jaime silently agreed with his father's former dog. Most of the time there was no simple way to tell what was right, and what was wrong, and the happiness of some was more times than not the misery of others. Highgarden confirmed that wisdom. The city of harpists, fiddlers and river boats, of good life and the luxury of flowers, was as prepared for a siege as a pig was for slaughter.

Apart from the crops and sweet smelling meadows still in blossom there was nothing. No strategy, or plan for defence. A river of refugees from all the Reach prowled the streets unattended and lived on retelling the stories of horror and dying to anyone willing, or unwilling to listen. Yes, it was the ironborn who were coming. No, it was a red-hatted sorcerer from across the sea who led them. No, it was the one-eyed man. Yes, their ships flew. Or they drove on the firm ground like carriages, on enormous wheels. Their army counted thousands, no, tens of thousands strong armoured knights. They had dragons, one, or two, or seven, white, or orange, or green in colour, with bright flaming scales. The stories gained more detail with every passing moment, and the number of souls seeking shelter among the crumbling walls of the noble seat of the House Tyrell grew out of all proportions. The walls of Highgarden were beautiful, yet old, and they had not seen much use since Robert's rebellion. The knights of the House Tyrell were too few, half of their forces staying in King's Landing with their lord.

"So where is this horn we are looking for?" Jaime asked Mance, impatient, pondering that he could burn the wildling alive instead of Gregor if an answer wasn't forthcoming.

"On the way here," the northerner replied curtly when they were at the gates, before he switched to Common Tongue on his faithful lute. He had to sing only about half of the verses from A Bear and a Maiden Fair with an air of utmost debauchery to pay for their passage with his music. They were allowed behind the weak walls like mummers, what else. Absent in his spirit or not, the singer did his part, and Jaime had no doubt that he would come up with a crazy idea about retrieving the horn. Jaime, however, would have preferred a plan guaranteeing the survival of all, and he didn't trust Mance to provide one. For he found that the wildling worked only for himself, and his true purpose remained largely unknown.

They arrived just on time. A few days before the cold autumn would devour the last glow of summer in the Reach. And the scouts reported that the enemy would be there next morning with the first light. The heralds drummed the arrival of the doom through the busy streets. The company's time was up and only the misfortune was acquainted with what they should expect.

Jaime lingered next to Brienne that night, watching the full moon rise. Then he just stared at her elongated form in the silvery light, while she pretended to be asleep. He may have never have seen her as she truly was if the life had been less cruel to them both. He remembered the first time he noticed she was a _woman,_ no more and no less, revealed to him in the baths of Harrenhal, when he hurried to blame the strong reaction of his body to the half-dead condition he was in and to being away from Cersei. She cradled him when he fainted then, and the breathing of her body next to his held the most exquisite quietness he had ever known. He could never entirely forget it later on, although he had tried to deny its appeal.

Jaime had learned better.

He found her beautiful beyond reason. Every freckle and every straw that passed for hair, immensely glad she didn't share the cursed curls of most of the Lannisters. An image of babies he could nurse in his arms as they fell asleep, with green yellow dotted eyes and sharp blond hair, took shape in his mind, until he just had to tell her something to chase it away.

"Follow me," he told her, simply, ignoring her show of sleeping.

"Where to?" she honoured him by opening the blueness of her eyes under the lemon tainted moon, accepting his left hand with an air of unfeigned innocence.

So he took her to the ancient rose fields on the outskirts of the city where the refugees did not camp, for the ground between the secular dark green bushes was strewn with thorns, too difficult to conquer with tents and human waste. The flowers were not all golden there, but of many different colours. He chose a place where a few large orange roses still flowered on a climbing rose, exhaling a sweet smell of a summer that had passed.

"Here," he said cutting one of them, with a dagger he chose to carry in place of a sword. There would likely be no room for real swordplay during siege, in a close fight. More tender, he continued. "My lady."

Brienne blushed prettily, on her scarred cheek as well, as Jaime watched her with delight.

"I would never dare to offer you a red one," he spoke, determined to _tell_ her, should he not have another opportunity to do so any time soon, "but I find that this colour matches your bravery and your perseverance where everyone else would fail. And it is most fitting for the most beautiful of women, that you are to me."

She opened her mouth to deny his words. But then, instead, she acquiesced to taking the flower and tucked it, challenging him, in the front opening of a warm tunic she wore, accidentally scratching her rosy coloured chest with one of the thorns, so that a single drop of blood twinkled brightly, bathed in the moonlight.

Golden flames danced merrily in Jaime's head at her gesture. A fire was started under his eyelids, and it reminded him, illogically, of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, the least in love with fire and blood of all the Targaryens Jaime had known.

Still, he wanted to _tell_ her, and the foolishness could wait for another time if there would be any forthcoming. She already knew that he wanted her.

So in place of forcing his way to land on top of her as his body screamed he should do, he lifted her from the thorny ground and carried her forward, as it ought to be done with the girl one adored. She was heavier than Cersei, yet not that massive at all, a large-winged butterfly of sorts, fluttering in his embrace, genuinely surprised at the occurrence, and, he hoped, a bit pleased. Her arms went around his neck, and in that, too, she was a woman. He would carry her forever, and proving that he could, easily, whether she was taller than him or not, gave him immense joy.

The flames twirled again behind his eyelids, the leaping tongues of fire burning white.

At the end of the field, there was a flat stone, still preserving the warmth of the day on its hard surface. Jaime sat down, never releasing the delicate burden of his choosing, and launched his chin upward to kiss her as he had never done before.

He drowned in her, wildly, inconsiderately, and she yielded to him, or he to her, there was no simple way to tell. When they parted, after a long moment, he was finally able to tell her.

"I have never kissed Cersei like this," he told her, and stubborn as she was, Brienne must have understood, in part. For her lips spread in a grin as he had never seen it coming, before they kissed him on, madly.

The fire slowly dwindled behind his eyes, wide open in the moonlight, and he was able to move away, foreheads touching still, to tell it all and to tell it true.

"I have never loved Cersei like this," he told her. "I have never loved anyone else this way. It's just you."

She stared at him, mutely, the passion quenched by his confession, the blue eyes watery like tiny lakes spilling over after the rain, the sapphires with a measure of brilliance, such as the world had never seen.

"I just thought you should know," he added, lamely, with finality. "Before you attempt to do whatever has been on your mind of late."

He wouldn't stand in the way of her chase for honour. But he would stand behind her, to whatever end. He wasn't able to tell her that too, but he was going to show her. One way or another.

Brienne led the way back to the company, more closed in her demeanour than an ancient grave.

**Sandor**

The Hound sneaked past the gnats who guarded the main gate long before the first light of the day. He crawled out of the city of food growing peasants agile as the light, determined to count the strength of the enemy in person. He was not one to cast his life away needlessly if it would not mean securing Sansa's future at the court of the new Dragon Queen, as far as that was possible to achieve at all.

 _They are worse than gnats_ , he corrected his thought about the inhabitants of Highgarden, _not working on their own defences while they still can_. He had witnessed men grown wailing like women and children, in the crowded streets turned to encampments of those who had lost everything except of their worthless lives.

Dressed in browns of the Faith one more time, he melted to the soil like a starving hound smelling a deer. Except that the game he sought approached from the west, too large for his feral bite.

The fields around Highgarden had gone to bed in gold, but they had woken in blue.

Winter roses grew high overnight.

They blossomed on bushes that were yesterday golden, or red, orange and pink within the walls. They covered all the land as far as the eye could see. Overgrowing the wheat, the barley, and the turnip, between the peach-trees of the orchards, they smelled of false spring come again.

People quailed in fear; they spoke of evil magic and of the end of time, but the Hound, normally prone to believe the worst of almost any work of men, could find no harm in the blue smelly buds and their pointed thorns. It seemed to him that the vast fields have risen to protect their clueless people from the new danger lurking in the west.

So it was no wonder that a particularly large rose bush served as his shelter when the army of the invaders finally arrived. It almost seemed to have heard his thoughts in favour of the plants, as opposed to people, and grown in height and width to better conceal the Hound's significant stature.

Forward came the ironborn, bragging and insolent, their faces radiant and victorious, several hundred strong men, well armed with swords and axes. Sandor Clegane's sword had known them well enough when he climbed the walls of Pyke as a young lad, helping his liege lord crush Balon Greyjoy's rebellion.

Then came the prisoners rattling their chains, walking barefoot on thorns, empty-eyed, and too exhausted from the long march to utter a sound. A black haired boy who could be seven firmly held a hand of a mousy haired girl who could be five, and a lonely mother carried two infants in her arms. There came many more like them, the women and the young, and very few men, most of them very old. They wore collars such as the Hound had never seen and he wondered what was their purpose. Such was the fate of the weak in an ongoing war, to cater to the whims of the strong. Yet the mute agony and a sheer number of the defeated made a notch in Sandor Clegane's battle hardened heart, overgrown in weeds of anger for too many years.

 _The slaves,_ he realised. The ironborn haven't been taking prisoners. They were bringing slavery to Westeros.

The slaves separated to leave a huge clearing in their middle. Some ten women walked forward and opened the pouches full of red rose petals, in all likelihood plucked elsewhere in the Reach, throwing them on the ground to pave the way for what was coming next.

A black sail on a single mast.

A red hull ship where there was no sea.

She was being carried high up on arms and shoulders of a thousand men.

Men who were not men, for their eyes shone cold and blue, not the blue of the winter roses, but the deadly blue of winter. A maid carved of iron adorned her prow, and the maiden's mouth appeared freshly painted in dark red colour as the hull of the ship. On the deck stood proudly a one eyed man, his only eye neither blue, nor black as it should have been. Next to him was a tall red priest, not Thoros, a different one, black of skin, garbed in red, his head covered with white hair wrapped tightly in a red scarf, its edges flying in the breeze. Behind them was a dragon horn, mounted in a massive iron frame, on a pedestal of steel. There were writings on it, and the rings of red molten gold as the wildling said there would be.

Euron Greyjoy had arrived to conquer Highgarden on the wings of an army of wights. A closer look to the dead revealed them to be fathers and husbands, sons and grandsons of the slaves that had walked at the forefront of their master. More wights followed the ship from all sides than was required to carry her, more than it could be counted.

And after, after the black ship, _Silence,_ the Hound recalled its name, after Silence came the thing the Hound would never have expected if he had another life to live all over.

Two dragons flew peacefully half a league behind and above the ship, larger than any birds, obstructing the skies. One was white, with a gleam of gold on its scales in the morning light, the other emerald green like the water of some rivers in the West, guardians of Sandor Clegane's childhood.

The Hound ducked reflexively, half expecting to be baked alive in an instant. An unreasonable desire to scream came over him, but he slowly willed it away. The dragons had a special sense to feel their enemies, he had heard from the Imp in Casterly Rock, the Imp who read everything that there was to read. Then again, who was their enemy? And what right had Euron Greyjoy, an Ironman from the Iron Islands to the bone, to command the creatures of fire and blood? What more right than Sandor Clegane, a Westerman and a grandson to a kennelmaster? The Hound concluded that his and Euron's rightful claim to the dragons was about the same, straightening his broad shoulders behind the rose bush, intent to observe more.

The dragons followed the ship from a distance, exhaling puffs of white smoke, calm as doves in the morning wind. _Something is not right,_ the Hound thought, _a dragon should be a wild animal, cruel and vicious._ But maybe they were held in an invisible cage of magic Euron had discovered in Asshai, when his brother Balon banished him for some terrible deed involving a woman of his other brother, Victarion. And what Euron had done must have been more ungodly than usual because the ironborn where not exactly known in the Seven Kingdoms for their gentleness towards women.

The ship sailed on the shoulders of the wights almost to the gates of Highgarden where Euron made a step forward, not abandoning his ship, and announced to the defenders, gathered on the city walls, trying, at least, to look braver than they were.

"People of Highgarden!" he addressed them in a voice seemingly full of wisdom, which the Hound immediately did not trust. "Come and pledge loyalty to your rightful King, Euron, First of His Name, Lord of Dragons, great and merciful. Come now, and your women and children will be spared, to pour my wine and serve my food, while your men will join my proud army. Tonight my faithful servants will recruit your men whether you accept it or not. But if you don't submit willingly, I will butcher your young first. The choice is yours."

A burned man, alone, walked out through the gates. Sandor Clegane had to crawl closer to see who it was. _It was, it was, it couldn't be!_ he thought when the human shipwreck spoke and the Hound knew him. _Ser Loras Tyrell, the Knight of Flowers, disfigured just like myself._

"Lord Greyjoy," Ser Loras spoke politely, "the tidings we received spoke that you grant one day of peace if a city you approach offers a champion to blow a horn you are treasuring. And that should anyone stay alive after blowing it, you would grant him and his people a long life in peace."

"Aye," Euron said, waiting.

"And will you hold true to your word in the light of the Seven?"

"And in the flames of R'hllor, the Lord of Light, and in the watery halls of the Drowned God in the depths of the seas, if you ask me to swear by any of them."

"He will not," a dead man spoke from under the ship. "He is faithless and he will play you for a fool."

 _Balon's brother the sea priest?_ the Hound tried to remember.

"Dear brother," Euron spoke, "do kill those two children for me!" he ordered pointing at the lonely mother holding her babes. The dead man who spoke struggled against the command, but he still left his position in the lines, walked forward and raised his longsword to obey.

"Enough!" Euron stopped him before the wight's blade would strike.

"See," he told Ser Loras, "I am the lord of my armies even if some of them dare to speak against me. And I will hold true to my word."

"I have two brothers," Ser Loras said, observing the horn with the eagerness of a knight of summer, unaware of his own peril. "I will blow the horn today and they will follow on the morrow, and the day after, should I fail. Which I do not expect can happen."

"Are your brothers… strong?" inquired the red priest next to Euron.

"Stronger than I am in body," Ser Loras said, boasting when he continued, "but I have more prowess in battle despite my recent injuries."

"Splendid," Euron said, eagerly, looking at the foreign priest with the hint of uncertainty.

 _So they want a strong man to blow the buggering thing,_ the Hound thought. _Now why would that be?_ Sandor Clegane couldn't take his eyes away from the great instrument in its iron holdings, wondering what its sound would be like, hollow, hoarse or resounding in mighty echoes all over the green valleys and the hills of the Reach. _If I blow it,_ he thought, _would she hear how my life ended all the way in King's Landing. Would she know? And would she regret it…?_

"The rule is simple," Euron instructed Ser Loras who jumped on the deck in two confident strides over the heads of the dead, approaching the horn. "You blow and you carry the horn forward when blowing. The strongest among men have made but a few steps. If you reach the gates of your city still carrying the horn you will be spared."

Renly's lover approached his doom with no fear, and took utmost care to press the _unburned_ part of his once handsome face to the mouthpiece of the horn, a smooth opening lined with red metal on the narrowing upper part of the _thing_ where one was supposed to blow, Sandor guessed. Despite his recent transgressions in the world of mummery, he knew next to nothing of musical instruments. Except that he didn't like the sound of most of them.

Ser Loras' unconscious gesture of vanity reminded the Hound of all the times he combed his hair to cover his scars in vain, and when he tried hard to turn the good side of his face to people. _I don't do this any more,_ he realised, and it felt like victory. Since the Quiet Isle, he frequently walked bare-faced, hair tossed backwards, even tied, _forgetting_ about his looks even if the others did not. And Sansa, she could still not look him in the eye, but her heart-shaped face had touched his scars in the dark when she could not see him properly. It wasn't what he yearned for, but it was _something._

Fearless, Ser Loras blew.

Strong, the horn sounded.

Fearless, Ser Loras walked.

Mighty, the horn bellowed.

Fearless, Ser Loras made three steps, then four, then five. Almost ready to descend the ship.

Euron was not far behind him. Only when Ser Loras collapsed to the ground in uncontrolled spasms, blood trickling from his mouth, the one-eyed man bent and touched the arched back of the dying boy, unmanned in his failure, writhing on the deck, bawling more pitifully than a newborn baby. Sandor Clegane felt the unquenchable anger taking hold of his body. He would have squashed Euron's head as Gregor did with Oberyn Martell if only the ironborn leader was at the reach of his long arms. He believed that Euron's neck cracking could emit the sweetest sound of all. Much more satisfying than the roar of the deadly horn at any rate.

But that would not help his little bird, nor the Dragon Queen, the only serious contender for the Iron Throne in Sandor Clegane's opinion, cultivated for years among the intrigues of the court. Daenerys seemed to have a small amount of honour somewhere inside her soul where it should have been. And the Hound found that particular place to be mostly occupied by the love of oneself. Especially in kings and queens, the high lords and their ladies.

 _You could protect her,_ the treacherous voice throbbed in his guts. But he was only one man who could be killed, and Sansa's claim too large to be left alone. As much as he hated the conclusion, the only possibility for her safety would be to have a just king, or much better, in the Hound's opinion, the just queen. For, in truth, the one he hid from himself, there was also Aegon who may have had _some_ honour. But Aegon had a cock in his breeches, and the Hound would never trust another man when it came to Sansa, even if he would be Baelor the Blessed come to life.

Mastering his anger, he forced himself to _look._ Looking was the key. If you looked long enough, you would see. You would find out what had to be done even if the battle didn't look promising for you at a given moment. After touching Loras, Euron looked expectantly towards the dragon, waving like a lord to the green one. The beast issued a weak roar and flapped its wings in the direction of the iron leader, but after a few meters it halted in its flight, inert and at peace again, turning on its _back_ to float _leisurely_ on the invisible surface of the air, claws playfully clutching at the sky above.

Euron's shoulders slumped, and Sandor crept even further, behind the boy and the girl slave who stood with their back to the bush, only a dozen steps away from the dark red hull of the ship.

From close by, the Hound could see the difference in the colour of the hull and the freshly painted mouth of the iron maid. He heard that Euron called his ship Silence because he cut the tongues of those who manned it, but it would seem that His-Buggering-Grace-Wishful-Lord-of-Dragons had changed his wont. The maid's mouth had been painted in blood. It was best not to dwell to who it belonged but the image of two babes, still alive for the time being, rushed unstoppable to the deck of the Hound's conscious mind.

Focusing on more _useful_ perceptions one more time, Sandor could swear that he could hear the red priest consoling Euron. For sooner or later they would find someone with blood _strong_ enough to blow the horn and thus _bind it_ to Euron.

The branch of the rose bush moved. He had crept to close. _The boy slave._ He had seen him.

The Hound gripped the hilt of his sword but the boy said submissively. "Don't hurt me and my sister, good ser, please." Unmanned by the boy's plea more than Ser Loras was in dying, Sandor Clegane visibly relinquished his hold on the weapon. Showing an open palm to the boy, he rasped softly. "How many men did he make blow that thing since he enslaved you?" "A dozen," the girl answered, more daring than her brother.

"And the dragons, what did they do?"

"Mostly nothing," the boy said. "Just flew lazily like birds, today is the first time one of them seemed to heed to King Euron's bidding."

"And the dead who blew the horn?"

"They come to life at night," the girl said with fear. "And they can make other dead people rise from their grave, too. They are the only ones."

"Thank you," he whispered to them, not believing his own courtesies.

Quiet as a shadow of the evening that would come, he moved to crawl away. But before he could do it, two babes have been pushed in his arms, and it was the strangest thing that had ever happened to him, stranger than Sansa kissing him. (For he always believed she _would_ kiss him one day in the dreams he denied having).

"Take them to the city," the lonely mother begged him. "They are good babes, not very hungry, they can drink water from boiling if there is no milk. They don't have a collar so King Euron will never know."

Staying where he was for much longer was not clever at all, so he nodded to the woman, and withdrew behind the rose bush. The babes looked at him mildly.

"Keep your mouth shut," he told them. And they did.

Sneaking back in such company took more time. When he approached the side gate of the city, the Hound was not surprised at all when he saw another shadow, that one with a lute, slipping in right after him. The enemy camped ostentatiously at the main entrance, ignoring all the others. The ironborn seemed to be waiting for the nightfall.

The fresh announcement of King Euron crowed in the light with false benevolence. "Your first hero has failed! I will wait for the second one on the morrow. And in token of my gratitude for his life, I will leave your young untouched tonight, I will only take the men, which are rightfully mine…"

"The fires," Mance said to the Hound, forward thinking as ever. "We have to make a ring of fire around the entire city, on top of the first line of battlements and in front of the gates. It destroys the wights. This new mummer, Euron, he may be many things, but he is surely not a walker. The Others never talk to the living as far as I know. Come."

"Only if you help me with this first," the Hound said, pushing one of the babes to the arms of the wildling king. "We should find a woman who hasn't completely lost her mind from the siege and who knows what to do with these."

The face of the wildling king went white like a corpse, thin like colourless glass. The Hound could swear that the fellow killer nearly shed a tear when the baby leaned the little head on his chest, and peacefully went to sleep.

**Aegon**

Aegon VI Targaryen and Robert Sweetrobin Arryn stood above the unconscious body of Septa Lemore, twisting like a snake in too fast erratic movement on the floor of her chambers. White bubbles foamed in ugly shapes on her gracious mouth. The septa's headdress was dropped, revealing hair almost as long as the woman who wore it, a mixture of silver, black, and grey, of a rare beauty, not braided as would be the custom in the south. Aegon considered that septas probably did not style their hair. The veil did for that.

"What is wrong with her?" Aegon asked Robin. "I will have to call the Elder Brother again."

"The Elder Brother left," Sweetrobin said. "With Mance, for the horn."

"What is this disease?"

"I think I know, Your Grace," Robin said with deep shame.

"You? How?"

"I suffer the same," Sweetrobin admitted fearfully, awaiting a reaction of his new friend and his king. When none came, and Aegon appeared full of concern for the ill septa, the young falcon continued. "The Maester in the Vale used to give me sweetsleep to calm me when it would happen. At first, I had more and more attacks, and they lasted longer and longer. I suspected that a day would soon come when I should die of them. But then the gods must have had mercy on me because I grew taller, and stronger. I had fewer attacks since I left the Vale so I could do without medicine. We should raise her head that she doesn't choke on her own tongue. Normally she should wake up when the seizure passes, if she lived this long with that hardship."

Together they carried the unconscious woman to her featherbed, propping her high up on a rolled heap of bedding. There was no pillow. For as long as Aegon knew her, Septa Lemore had slept without. Her breathing eased when they did that.

"You can go now, Robin," Aegon said. "Tell Jeyne and Willow I will join you shortly."

Aegon sat for long with the woman who was like a mother to him, until the evening came, casting long shadows through the Red Keep. Septa Lemore opened her eyes with difficulty.

"You will forgive me the lack of delicacy, to ask this when you are not well," he told her, colder than he intended. "But I know that a dagger is your weapon."

"You know many things about me," she told him in a weak voice, trying to smile, or to sit straight, failing at both.

"A piece of a grey dress I offered to the Lady Sansa was found in the godswood tinged by blood. Hers, most likely. She is missing. It was cut out with a knife it seems."

"How long have I slept?" she asked, ignoring the question, disorientated.

"That is what I would wish to know as well," the young king said with suspicion. "I should have your head, septa, if I am to be a just king."

"For what?" she asked. "For possessing a dagger? Is having a weapon a crime?"

"And the tears of Lys," Aegon whispered, studying the dullness of the walls, unable to look at the septa. "You put it in my wine, didn't you?" he accused her. He knew she did. She had been putting something in his wine since he was a young boy. He had always known, but he would have never believed it if anyone had told him it was poison.

There was no answer so he screamed in frustration, forgetting about the hidden eyes and ears. "Didn't you?"

"I did," she admitted.

Aegon took his head between his palms and started crying. "I loved you as a mother," he said. "Why?"

"Aegon, I love you still as I would have loved a son of my own flesh," she pleaded. "But I cannot tell you what you are asking of me."

Clear water glimmered in the purple depths of her gaze, mirroring Aegon's own. "I promised someone on their deathbed that I would never tell you."

"And you would keep that promise at the price of your own life?"

"I would."

Aegon gave an incredulous laugh through his tears.

"Did you honestly expect another answer after knowing me for as long as you remember yourself?"

"No," Aegon shook his head.

"If it is of any consolation to you," she volunteered, voice slowly gaining its natural strength. "I didn't put poison to your wine to harm you. I have been adding poison to your food and drink for the past ten years precisely to keep the harm away from you. It has probably saved your life. For you were already used to small quantities so when someone else in this _cursed_ Keep started doing what I have been doing for years it had no effect on you."

"It did on Peck and Pia!" he cried out again.

"Even so, had the assassin known, they would have been dead. As would you. This way the quantity was inadequate, and the results different."

"But you cannot tell me with what reason you were _poisoning_ me?" he tried asking again.

"No, Aegon," she refused him, flatly. "Do not ask of me what I cannot give. Have me killed if you must. Or let me live by your side as I did until now. I have made my bed and I'm ready to lie in it."

"And the Lady Sansa?"

"Lady Sansa came to see me this morning and then she left. Septa Tyene was with me all the time, during her visit, and after, until I fainted. Then Tyene must have gone looking for help. She can confirm it to you," Septa Lemore said, sounding deeply wounded for the first time since they started the conversation.

Aegon regretted posing the question, noticing the bath tub still half full of water, and the presence of numerous small objects he almost never used, but the women did when they visited each other. A cup, a glass, an abandoned needlework. Winter cloaks and robes prepared for the colder weather.

"Forgive me," he said. "I should have never doubted you."

"It's all right, son," she said, playing with a few lose strands of silver hair crawling down his shoulders. "Who gave you the news?"

"Lord Baelish," Aegon confessed.

"Grievous as this proof is," Septa Lemore said, "I believe that the Lady Sansa may yet live. She is made of sterner stuff than it would seem at first glance."

"I will go and see my aunt," Aegon informed her. "We should head to the Reach if only half of the rumours are true. We cannot trust a group of haggard men to do the duty of the rightful king; to keep the king's peace."

"Not all haggard men are broken, son," Septa Lemore said. "But you may be right. Speak to Daenerys and do not worry about me. I will be all right."

"Will I be all right? Ever?" Aegon asked, a little boy come to his mother again.

"Do not think of that, ever," Septa Lemore answered with passion uncharacteristic for her order. "Think only of the next thing to be done. It may help."

Aegon took his leave, knowing even less, and having more questions than he had when he came to see her. Still, he was profoundly reassured of the goodness of Lemore's heart, proof or no proof of her wrong doing. _Isn't everyone wrong about certain things in life?_ he mused.

The Sword of the Morning turned restless in its scabbard, waiting to be used. War was upon his kingdoms, and Aegon was not going to leave them unprotected for as long as he drew breath. He didn't think his father would do it either.

Even if he had no dragons **.**


	35. Birds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the things take a turn for the worse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: in this chapter rape is mentioned. It is shown as if it is about to happen in the main plot (but it doesn't) and it is mentioned in a mummery, in an ugly way, albeit as a past event not taking place on the stage. It is most probably the only place in this story where rape that truly occurred will be mentioned, and not in a nice way, even if without too many details, that is at least my estimation of it.

**The sleeping girl**

It was only good that the direwolves did not enjoy eating birds. Or the wolverine's mouth would be stuffed full with feathers already, and the girl who still didn't know her name would be nauseated in her vivid dreams.

She couldn't find _anyone_ in this waking dream she was having, not the stupid boy, and certainly not her sister. And her other sister whose skin she borrowed to dream on, the huge grey one with sharp teeth, she got hungry from useless prowling down the corridors of the Red Keep when she could have been hunting tasty rats in the sewers of the capital, or stray dogs in the dirty streets. Sniffing took the sleeping girl straight to her sister's _blood,_ spilled in the godswood, and to the man with calculating green eyes who took the stained piece of her sister's dress as a _proof_ of something to the young king. The direwolf hid in the shadows then, and followed the king who went to the septa who smelled somehow familiar even if the girl couldn't tell why. Could it be that she also had wolf dreams like the sleeping girl did? Or was she merely a friend of another lady wolf who had died so long ago, but the realm remembered her still. For it was in the name of that other dead wolf girl that the kingdoms had gone to ruin and to despair. The sleeping girl had been told many times, in her other life she could not remember, that she had looked a lot like that other, dead girl, but she had always dismissed it as a giant lie. The dead wolf girl had been beautiful and the sleeping girl was not. There was nothing to add to that.

The snake woman came to see the septa soon after the young king, only to leave too, in a great hurry to be somewhere else, rather than in the Red Keep. The sleeping girl could understand that with ease. The septa told the snake woman about the raven, the white tailed one, the one who would meet her half-way to tell her to which noble house of the Reach she should go. The snake woman was dressed in soft brown leather, lean and meager, an odd-shaped spear in her hand. Determination glimmered in her eyes. All that fitted the dark-skinned woman very well, unlike the black too large skin of a septa she was hiding in until then. Just like a thin sharp sword, _Needle,_ had always fitted the sleeping girl. Until the dragon queen has taken it for safe-keeping, and guarded it well, grateful for the gift of her life. The first time the sleeping girl opened her real eyes in years, she saw the queen's lilac ones twinkling in the dark, and her wolf blood had told her she had been wrong: wrong in obeying the order to take the life of a dragon. The dragon queen did not deserve the gift of the god the girl served, and she who had lost her face, wished fervently to find it again, but so far she could not. All she could do was sleep and have wolf dreams.

The leather clad woman _was_ a snake, dangerous and fast. It was good that she found the way to shed her wrong skin on time. Before her body would overgrow it and the snake would choke. Like the sleeping girl could die if she didn't soon find a way to wake up and be her old self.

 _The ravens,_ the sleeping girl dreamed on. _I have to find those. They may have seen my sister. They see everything and everyone under the high skies, they can even sometimes see the arrival of the kings and queens to their cities, and the rightfulness in people._ The words rang true, but the girl had no prior knowledge of what she had just thought, so maybe she was thinking the thoughts of the wolf, and not her own. There was no clear way to tell.

The ravens had their cages on the upper levels of the Keep, under the hollow aged eaves of the red tiled roof. Luckily there was no man with them at that time, so there could be a wolf. The chatter of birds became terribly loud when the direwolf found them and pawed the narrow bars, standing up on her hind legs. The growing hunger suggested the wolf to tear apart the weak door of the cage and _feast_ , but the sleeping girl asked her not to do that, and the birds were luckily not so tasty as other animals. The wolf waited.

At first the girl thought they had frightened the birds, until she realized that the black ravens were not the only ones fighting for bird food in the same holding place. A large black bird of prey with a patch of lighter coloured greyish feathers on its head, and a white tail, lay hurt among bird droppings, exhausted from a long flight. _Not a raven,_ the girl thought, but she had no idea what sort of bird it was, a falcon, or an eagle of sorts. The real ravens croaked at it but mostly they cried to one another, announcing the arrival of some sort of doom. Long ago, in the cold of the north, in its endless woods and hilly lands, the sleeping girl had known falcons and eagles, but that bird of prey was one of a kind. A different bird, regal, starving after a along journey, yet barely able to pick up a grain.

Before the wolverine could find out something more from the talkative ravens, for the animals could talk to each other, mostly, the girl's dream abruptly ended. The girl was back in the belly of the ship, and she thought that a silver-haired lady had been watching over her sleep. It was soothing. She had to be patient and wait until the new dream would come again. Maybe when the silver lady went south, and west. Daenerys didn't know it yet, but the girl could feel her departure in the air as surely as she had learned to distinguish the faces of the Many-Faced God. _Is that her name?_ the girl wondered. _If it is, it fits her well._ Her last conscious thought was a hope that Nymeria did not eat the unfamiliar large bird of prey and found something else to content her gnawing lack of nourishment. Then, she drifted into nothing.

**Petyr**

Lord Baelish enjoyed the spectacular view of the ancient capital of the Seven Kingdoms, from his stark new, pristine chambers, next door to the new lodging prepared for the Hand of the King, after Cersei had burned down the Tower of the Hand. The stone walls of the Keep ran steeply down towards the cliffs, kissing the sea where the sun would soon bury itself, its path unhidden by anything built by man or any piece of land. It was the most visible sign of Petyr's new high standing in the court of King Aegon, Sixth of His Name, and of the enduring admiration of Lord Connington towards the unmistakable gifts of the master of coin.

He kept waiting for Varys and the High Septon to answer his summons and appear, as the charming view slowly turned from blue to grey.

It started to rain.

Sansa was nowhere to be found but Petyr Baelish had no doubt that she would appear when his new plan would come to fruition. For it was nothing like Sansa, or her noble dead father, to let an innocent woman lose her head over a murder she did not commit, wasn't it? All the time Sansa spent as Alayne Stone could not have changed certain things, and it would work, as most things, to Petyr's favour.

A large black bird, which would be a raven if its beak was not sharper, its body three times as large, and the tip of its head and its tail white, flew towards the master of coin through the second autumn shower that had stricken the capital, landing on a prominent white-washed window sill. Content with finding a firm spot in the torrent of the elements, it croaked.

Petyr Baelish was in an excellent mood no rain could spoil. All his plans had been finally set in motion. No matter who won the Iron Throne, Petyr made certain that he would win as well. So he took a leftover of bread from breaking his fast, and gave it out generously to the bird, feeling merciful and lordly.

 _And unless someone murders her in truth, I will have Sansa, maiden or not,_ Petyr's thought was more refreshing than rain, and not innocent at all.

The bird croaked again, swallowing the bread offered to it in its entirety, as if it were a chunk of meat and not a bite of dry grain.

"Lord Baelish," a slow guarded voice of the eunuch sounded from behind. "I see that you have taken a new liking to birds."

"A bird is my sigil, after all," he retorted, glad to see the stern dark shift of the High Septon finding its way to his chambers too. Connington would be late but they didn't need that oaf for the discussion he had in mind.

"Always prudent, as I like to say," Varys continued. "My little birds tell me you have sent ravens to Lord Greyjoy to sue for peace, without consulting the young king."

"I consulted his Hand, the king needs must not know everything. He gave me full royal powers in matters pertaining to the business of the kingdoms," the Lord Paramount of the Trident unveiled the maidenly blank parchment signed and stamped by the king and his Hand.

"Some would call writing to the contender for a throne treason, my lord," observed the High Septon.

"Some would," Baelish agreed as well, looking through the window at the rain that kept falling, impervious to the counsel of others. There was another bird now, next to the black white-tailed one, a much younger brownish bird of prey. Two ordinary ravens flanked the odd black bird, as an escort of a kind. Baelish gave all four birds some more bread, humming cheerfully a tavern tune. "Especially since His Grace has changed his mind about sending a northern traitor to the crown to Highgarden to defend the interests of the House Targaryen. King Aegon will now ride in person to meet Lord Greyjoy in the field of battle. What a song it will be! Alas my ravens have already gone to the pretender, and returned with the news before I have been informed of this change of attitude."

"What news?" the High Septon asked, _hiding something,_ Baelish noticed from the nervous wriggling of his wrinkled hands drier than old parchment. So he continued slowly, stressing every word in an insistent murmur. One could never tell who might have been listening. "That Lord Greyjoy will have mercy for all former servants of His Grace King Aegon when the House Greyjoy finally starts its rightful reign, may it last for long, flanked by two dragons. Euron One-Eye will marry Daenerys Stormborn, the most beautiful of women, and kill an impostor in the place of her nephew."

"Lord Baelish," Varys said. "You never cease to amaze me. But what if Princess Daenerys does not think so highly of this match?"

All birds croaked on the window and lifted flight, all except the white-tailed one who was cleaning its behind with its beak, wet feathers stuck out, shining clean with pearly drops of rain.

"She received me this morning," Baelish said. "And she was most pleased when I revealed to her the identity of her young would be assassin, imprisoned in her ship, imagine, no one else than the _lost_ Lady Arya Stark, younger daughter of Lord Eddard. It would seem that our former Hand had forwarded his hate towards all the Targaryens, for what had been done to his father, elder brother and sister. Even to his innocent daughters."

The High Septon was not convinced. "Women can be misleading, my lord. What were her exact words ?"

"Daenerys said that she was a young woman who knew little of the ways of war. Then she promised me a just reward for my services such as they were, and any position I wish to ask of her when she becomes the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms."

"And if Aegon prevails," Varys said, eyeing the large bird for some reason, "his Hand trusts that your virtues compensate for his shortcomings. How clever! Lord Baelish, I will take my leave now, and I thank you from all my heart for sparing my little birds the trouble of finding all this out. It was a most illuminating conversation."

"We have served different kings together, my lord," Baelish said prudently. "I don't see why we should not continue. The realm needs experienced and seasoned men."

"Like Lord Tyrell," said the High Septon.

"Like Lord Mace, the former Hand, may he enjoy having less duties in this dreadful times and spend more time with his loving family," Varys agreed. "With your leave, my lords."

"There is only one thing which requires the powers of Your Holiness to be solved," Baelish told the High Septon when they were left alone. "You have power to put to death any sinful servant of the faith. I have good reason to believe that the sweet septa who raised Aegon doesn't believe in Seven at all. She worships a red demon from across the sea. Another red sorceress of this false deity serves the pretender Stannis Baratheon. She had a septs burned in Dragonstone and further north, in the name of her god. I heard that this heresy is regrettably very widespread across the sea."

Petyr did not think there were so many septs in the North to begin with but he wouldn't remind the High Septon of this fact.

"That would be a most worrying thing, my lord. The servants of the Faith need to set an example of contrition in these troubled times. But the faith of the young king has been impeccable so far, and he loves this woman as a mother," the High Septon objected at first, but the desire to shed human blood shone unmistakably in his dark narrow eyes.

Petyr Baelish maintained his composure. Never betraying the immense gladness he felt, he slowly waved the white parchment signed by King Aegon in front of His Holiness. Modestly, he said. "Many and more things can happen when the young king marches to war."

"War is cruel and treacherous indeed," his talking companion admitted. The overlord of the riverlands bowed to the ground and kissed the hem of the roughspun robes, prompting his second guest to leave with his pride flattered and unchanged.

Then, alone and accomplished, Petyr Baelish carelessly threw the last piece of old bread to the large white-tailed raven outside his window. It seemed that the bird chirped a polite _thank you_ catching its food, before it flew away, taking with it the rain.

The autumn sun returned with force, and there was nothing that could possibly go wrong.

**Sandor**

The Hound carefully approached the bonfire at the main gates of Highgarden one more time. He stopped counting how many times they pushed off the wights and the ironborn away during the night, and how many men the enemy had snatched and took with them, screaming as the life was leaving them and they were forced to join the army of the dead. Much less than what _Lord Euron_ believed they would take in any case, the Hound had made certain of that. The army of His One-Eyed Grace did not increase by much, contrary to his solemn announcements of the day before.

The bloody singer had the entire city on its feet well before sunset, to the point that no one sought guidance in the House Tyrell any more, but in the tireless light-coloured cloaked man who rode and ran around the perimeter of the walls, starting fires, arranging fires, showing anyone who wanted to fight the best ways to keep the wights out, for the night, at least, in hope that the morning would bring new counsel. Some women joined the ranks of men and Mance encouraged others to do the same. All those unwilling or incapable to fight withdrew within the city, as far away from the city walls as possible.

The dead enemies could not fly, and the winged fire-spitting monsters remained floating languidly in the stale air of the night, charged with the smell of thousands of blue winter roses.

The Elder Brother fought next to Sandor Clegane, guarding the main gate, where the onslaught was the fiercest. The Kingslayer and his lady knight led the defence on the battlements above it. And Mance, the buggering Mance was everywhere, wielding a torch rather than a longsword, faster than the wind in the mountains, like the stuff the songs were made of, the Hound unwillingly admitted, a spirit of freedom mounted on his brown horse, which seemed so sturdy and slow when they journeyed south.

"Patience is of a northern race," Mance told them when they were setting the fires to burn, "from the mountains on the western edge of the place they call the Gift. Both men and animals wear large snowshoes not to fall through the high snow, and they can run swiftly enough in them. Faster then most of you can on your two feet. Such is the endurance of the north, when roused. The real north. I took Patience as a gift from Stannis, but only because his former owner, a clansman, had died."

The wildling's special treat were the wights, unlike the Hound's who preferred to face the ironborn and avoided the fire when he could. Not that he didn't cut into pieces his share of wights before the others would burn them when the need called.

The Hound moved two steps away from the fire, ready for another round of fighting. Soon, it was upon them.

The Elder Brother wielded a lance in close combat with dexterity the Hound has never seen. It reached the ironborn and the wights alike, for its top was partially made of a dagger wrought of Valyrian steel. Euron's red priest came with them that time, the last one behind his host, urging the corpses on with a prophetic voice. The Hound hated the lying sound of it. Way before Sandor could reach the priest, the Elder Brother was facing the man sworn to serve the Lord of Light, but who was nonetheless leading the company of darkness, as a good and proper knight. The tip of the bastard lance unwrapped the red scarf from the priest's head as if his skin had been peeled off. The unusual gesture sent the slave of R'hllor back running, ashamed, as if he were made to walk naked in front of a group of laughing maidens. The Elder Brother wrapped the fiery red tissue around his own head in a mimicry of a monk's cowl which he pulled back to hang over his shoulders.

"Some hedge knight you were," the Hound told the changing monk with new appreciation while they were waiting, again.

"Apparently," the older man joked back, re-arranged his new headdress and turned to dead silence. He spoke much less than usual since they left King's Landing and almost none of his scarce words were about the rather well hidden goodness and wisdom of the gods. The Hound considered it a good sign, that one of the cleverest men he had met had finally come to his senses about the condition of the world. "Look," the Elder Brother told the Hound with burning eyes, striving to see through the darkness. "A caravan!"

Aye, there was one, indeed, a grey trail of slow carriages on the move, approaching the battle raging around Highgarden in the ever thickening darkness.

"We have to help them get into the city," the Elder Brother was adamant and talkative again. "Or they will all become wights!"

"Why should we bother?" the Hound said but his feet still followed the monk, climbing on the battlements, finding the Kingslayer and the rest of their small party.

Before long they were forty strong men and women, ready to make a sortie through the gates to liberate the passage for the unsuspecting travellers.

The Elder Brother led the attack, red scarf floating in the darkness like a long flaming hair of a woman. His obsession with the rightfulness that had something to do with the Seven was unfortunately back in its full splendour, against any wishes Sandor Clegane may have had in that regard.

"Brother," the former hedge knight called out to the Hound, hesitantly, gaze pleading to be followed, and the Hound obeyed, a good dog as he was. Out there, there were no fires, only mindless wights, and he wasn't going to let the Elder Brother be killed over some noble thing or another. He had little time, and in what time he had, he would still protect him.

Some men and women in their party were armed with sharp black stones next to their blades. The word of the obsidian spread like an earthquake before the battle, and the forgotten valuable was recovered from kitchenware handles and obsolete storage rooms. Mance was at the rear, and next to him rode the Kingslayer, on a white horse, and his lady knight, on a darker palfrey, an orange rose shimmering against the background of the fires over her white blond hair.

When they reached the caravan, sneaking upon the enemy, a few ironborn men, living, not dead _yet_ , the Hound considered grimly, were busy getting out in the open several silent sisters, their cocks hanging loose and ready, in unhidden meaning of what they were about to do.

"What is the meaning of this?" the Elder Brother asked, not understanding what he saw.

"You were married," the Hound cut back. "You should know better than I."

"Someone else can have this one," one of the ironborn heroes said, tossing aside the woman he had grabbed first. "She's either ugly and wounded, or she's having her moonblood." The woman crawled wordlessly aside, pressing a bandage to her stomach.

"They are all ugly, all right," the other one said. "Only old women go to silent sisters. But a cunt is a cunt to me, it makes no matter."

The discarded woman was probably lucky that her would-be rapist was either too dumb or could not see very well in the dark. Her figure looked slender in the weak moonlight, and comely when the overwhelming robes hiding her body were on the move. The blood on her bandage had been dry for days. But something in the way she cringed from her attacker reminded Sandor of Sansa, so his sword found the belly of the man who touched her much faster than it normally would, before the brave man had a time to make another step. When Sandor Clegane turned around to help the woman on her feet, she was gone. They did short work of the rest. And the wights, for an unfathomed reason, stayed well away from that little ironborn feast. Perhaps Lord Euron, omnipotent as he saw himself, did not allow the wights the treat of raping women. Or the wights, being dead and all, did not care any longer for such dubious amusement.

The lady knight dismounted and fought the ironborn leader, a shaggy man of her size who wielded a huge axe. Mance wanted to interfere but the Kingslayer stayed his hand as he himself also stood and watched _his_ lady fight. The dance was slow and deadly, the axe against the sword, body pressing against body. The man finally had a good aim at the lady's blond head, oddly vulnerable despite her stature. When he thought that his strike could not fail, the woman bowed sharply and then moved forward rapidly, butting him with her tender looking head in the unarmoured parts under his stomach. The men would still lower his axe and reach his goal, if her short knife did not open his bowels first. The lady straightened up, not having a gift of mercy for her opponent.

"Now you have learned," she told him, "that not all of the women are helpless. If the gods see fit that you live, you may remember it."

With that she turned her wide back on the dying enemy, took the rose from her hair and offered it to the Kingslayer, as a proper knight would offer a favour to his lady. The Hound whistled rudely when the short-lived Lord Commander of the Kingsguard accepted the rose, only to press it on his mouth and stuck it back to the lady's breastplate, the only piece of the armour she wore, hastily arranged in the city before the battle had started.

 _This one is stronger than Cersei, who had always been brave in her own way,_ the Hound thought with amusement. _Even if she doesn't know it yet._

And seeing the handsome Jaime Lannister looking at the tall ugly woman as though she were the centre of his world filled Sandor Clegane's head with foolish hopes that Sansa may also have a weak spot in her heart for the ugly and the disfigured. Sansa who could not look at him, but whose way of not looking at him was _different_ than that of any other woman who could not look him in the eye in his past. A way of _not looking_ at him that made him see no other woman in addition to Sansa, not truly, ever since he first spoke to her as a young girl on the kingsroad. _Bugger all that._ He had to stop thinking of what would not be, find the singer, and move forward with the strategy to get the damned horn.

That was the only thing that could truly help Sansa, and he would be the one to do it. Tywin Lannister had taught Sandor Clegane to die for his liege lord, and he had taught him well.

The wights were coming silently after them one more time, as the caravan trotted safely towards the gates, most of its wagons already in.

The defenders backed to the fire guarding the entrance to the city. After several more hours of mindless fighting, the heralds announced victory, or rather, the absence of defeat, as the light of the day put all fighting to the halt.

It was a fine morning of a new day and Highgarden still stood.

Euron, by his own words the Lord of Dragons, would not be pleased.

xx

The Elder Brother returned last to the place where they camped, with one more trophy of the night, apart from the scarf of the red priest which now bound his bald head tightly, in place of a monk's cowl.

"It must be cleaner that way for the battle," Jaime Lannister commented on the monk's new style, but the Elder Brother did not deign answer, holding a large black bird seated on his right arm. The dark eyes of both man and bird were full of wonder.

The bird looked as if it had just flown over a hundred miles in a single flight, all bones and feathers with no flesh. The tip of its head and tail would have been white if they had not turned muddy and yellow brown from its journey.

"Another of your ravens?" Jaime asked maliciously after his first failed attempt to start a conversation.

"A hawk, I think, they are rare, if native to the Reach," the Elder Brother said examining his prize. "The silent sisters say it came flying after the caravan on the second or maybe the third day after their departure from King's Landing. They had mercy on the bird and fed it, at times. It probably just wanted to go home."

The bird crowed and pecked the monk's red scarf, lovingly.

Mance Rayder had been waiting for the rest of them for a while, hands full of fresh parchment he had filled with letters while they travelled.

"Friends," he said, "blood lust is upon us all. Since drinking or whoring is not wise in our present situation, I say that we could quench it by reading. And pray for the easy death in this war of those who were not so lucky as the silent sisters were last night. I am not a believer. Yet sometimes, I pray, when there is nothing else I can do."

Sandor knew of only one person who might convince him to do a thing like that (or to do anything at all), but she was far away and most likely did not think of him.

Luckily, he was not called out to read so he could just lower his hulking body on the ground and watch. The scene was nothing like the Hound expected, it was blunt and cruel like life itself. He was almost glad that Sansa was not there to witness it. The wildling kept silent all through the reading as if he had nothing more to add to the words he had written already. That, too, was a small miracle.

xx

"Arthur," his sister whispered seated on the ground, exhausted in mummery and in the real life after the battle. "Are they safe?"

"Rhaegar has taken Lyanna to the Tower of Joy. I managed to intercept them before they would reach Starfall and direct them elsewhere."

"Good," the whisper continued. The mute silence galloped faster than a herd of wild horses on the hot soil of Dorne.

"Ashara," Ser Artur said carefully, "Aerys's men they talked, when my men and I fell upon them, they say that they..."

"Yes," she answered before he could ask.

"Ashara!" Ser Arthur was on his knees next to his sister, wrapping a handless arm around her broad shoulders.

"It's all right, Arthur, don't be like that," she told him then, voice quiet and strong. "People make so much out of it, when it is nothing but a piece of man's flesh inserted in a woman by force. It hurts as any other wound of the body, according to the force that had caused it, and with the time it wears off like other cuts and bruises. It is over, and I will not let it diminish me."

"With time, you say... How many...?"

"Is it important?"

"Not any more," said Ser Arthur Dayne, somber and cruel. "For I have killed them all. All who dared to talk and a few more. I have never killed that many men in a single day. And I don't know what is more terrifying, that I could do that in cold blood, or what they did to you while I was gone. More likely, the latter."

"Arthur, listen to me," she pleaded. "Since you will not let it go until I tell you everything as it happened, you should find courage to listen. The host of Aerys's men rode into Starfall this morning as soon as you were gone. They asked me if I knew where you were or where Prince Rhaegar was. I told them that I did, but that I wouldn't tell them."

"But why? You didn't know where I went, and much less where Rhaegar was!" Ser Arthur yelled at his sister, and immediately lowered his voice, shy after his inappropriate reaction.

"If I told them that, what do you think they would have done?" she asked him and then answered her own query. "They would have either killed me and left, or let me live and left. More likely, the former. In either case they would find your trail, and then, they would know your whereabouts, and soon about Rhaegar's, even if I did not..."

"So I thought, if I tell them this, they will hurt me, but I will live until I tell them what I couldn't tell, not knowing it, and you will all live as well, because they will be hurting me, and not riding after you..."

"My sister and a hero," Arthur whispered.

"My lover and my man," she said back, softly, before daring to ask a question of her own. "Am I different now in your eyes? Unworthy? Spoiled? Ruined? Or any other word the world uses to describe a woman to whom this has been done?"

"Would I love you less if they cut off your arm? Would you love me less if I were crippled? I think not," replied the Sword of the Morning, as the man who read his part occasionally glanced at the stump where his right hand used to be, betraying his other thoughts.

"Aegon, is he still safe?" Ashara asked, finally.

"As safe as he can be in these times. Princess Lyanna is pregnant. He might have a brother or a sister soon."

"Do you think Rhaegar can both win over this rebellion and stand up to his father's growing madness?"

"I am convinced that Rhaegar can do anything if he so wishes,"Arthur said pensively. "I am just sometimes afraid that they will tell him something to make him lose his faith. If he remains himself, Rhaegar can win this war. If for nothing else, then because he had not started it, no matter what his father did to the Starks."

"And if he doesn't?"

"I guess, then, I will die defending him, or one of his queens, as the Kingsguard should do."

"I wish I could tell you not to do it, Arthur," Ashara said, seriously. "But how can I? When I have just nearly done the same without swearing any vows. It is somewhere in human nature, to be able to die for a worthy cause. It is what distinguishes us from the horses and the snakes, not prone to such folly."

"We will not think about it now, Ashara," Dayne said, frantically. "And if we have a year, a month, or a day left to live, it will be together. Even if what we have become is an ignominy in the eyes of the world."

"Hold me, Arthur," she said, sinking into his arms. "Don't do anything else. Not tonight. Tomorrow, I will love you again. Tonight, I only want to sleep."

That time, it was not Jaime who lost it during reading. The players have long finished speaking and sought guidance on what to do next. But the usually loud singer cowered in the darkest corner of their encampment, under the battlements, running away from any living sound other than that of his rustling thoughts.

The Elder Brother's hawk flew to the wildling's shoulder and bit his earlobe harshly before the owner of the assailed ear stirred to life.

"I wrote this as faithfully as I could to the story as it was," he said. "But seeing it makes my mind go bitter. For I am no better than the soldiers mentioned in my play, or the ironborn rapists we have just killed. Perhaps my execution was in order in Harrenhal."

Lady Brienne objected, "I have no great knowledge of men and their desires. But if you regret this much something you did, whatever it was, I can hardly think that you deserve dying."

"An interesting way of putting it," the singer said, somewhat more present. The black bird bit his other ear while he tried to chase if away, only to make it land on the Elder Brother's red wrapped head, as if it was a nest of a kind. "Thank you for your kindness, my lady, which I surely do not deserve," Mance Rayder said gratefully, with blatant honesty, earning him a dirty look from Jaime Lannister who had to rearrange his golden curls and try to tower _behind_ Brienne, as a lord would when his lady _complimented_ another man. The Hound burst into a dry laugh, hiding it in-between the wildling's continued words.

"I have known since I have first seen you tied in the firepit in the riverlands that you possessed an inner strength rather rare in either men and women," Mance said. "And I beg you to pardon me for saying so, but despite your rather...

"-Despite being ugly, you mean," the Hound had to mention, but no one reacted to his cruelty.

"Despite what anyone else has ever told you of your looks, my lady," Mance finished, ignoring Sandor Clegane's courtesies. "I would have never found another woman who would be either strong, impressive, or noble as you are, to read the part of Lady Ashara Dayne without false pretence."

The Lady Brienne blushed, and the Hound thought how Mance Rayder was a singer for a reason, after all. When it came to words, he was much better than Sandor Clegane, a grandson of a kennelmaster, soon to be counted among the burned dead, and not among the wights.

As long as the horn would be delivered to Daenerys and everyone would know it was he who did it, and that he did it only on behalf of Sansa.

"I have thought of something," he told them, being scrupulously dishonest, like when he lied to Joffrey for Sansa, hoping that no one shared his own sense of hounding out the truth, forever hidden somewhere between the many layers of smaller and bigger lies. "We have all come here to get the horn. We could use Gregor to fool Euron and obtain it, since we have him here with us whether we wished for it or not. Listen..."

All attention was on him then, even the sharp dark-grey eyes of the buggering bird studied him with curiosity, reminding him very strongly of his own.

The Hound continued to bring to light the strategy of his lifetime, in full knowledge that if it would come to pass, it would also mean his end.

His blood kept running equally warm, unafraid of the freeze that awaited it.


	36. The Long Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Sandor talks to what is left of Gregor, Jaime gets attacks of madness, a canon POV character dies and something else happens.

**Jaime**

The light was born unusually pale on the eastern sky to be considered daylight. Greyness reigned over Highgarden. Greyness never encountered hovered above the elaborately carved walls that were a work of art, rather than an instrument of war, and over their tired defenders. The army of the dead retired towards the green hills neighbouring the city with the arrival of the shadow of light. Only the ship, Silence, lay low in front of the gates, stranded on the ground between the bushes of winter roses climbing higher and higher, ruining the quiet existence of the morning by its imposing presence.

Jaime Lannister witnessed how Ser Willas Tyrell, the heir of Lord Tyrell, greeted Mance Rayder in the gloom that passed for daytime, thanking him for defending the city, when he, the rightful lord could not, mourning for his lost brother and anticipating to be the next one to follow in his steps. Garlan was married, so they decided he would be the last. Garlan's wife had joined the fighters in the battle, contrary to the expected tenderness of her green Fossoway ancestors. Ravens were sent to King's Landing, to Lord Mace and to King Aegon, and to Lord Tarly in his high seat in the Reach, which had not yet been ravaged by the dead. Ravens imploring aid.

Jaime whetted his dagger and dwelt on how singularly elating it was to stand and fight _next_ to Brienne, his joy at it sharper than any other thrill of life he had known so far. More mind turning than the constant fear of being discovered had been when he mainly lived for Cersei.

He wondered which member of his new company would be the last to burn, for he held no illusion: against the power Euron had mustered, there would be no victory. The weak light revealed a sea of wights covering the country as far as the eye could see. Unless, unless, if... So many things have happened that Jaime would never have believed in. Tommen was safe at the court of their mortal enemy, and Cersei was alive, somewhere, despite all her folly. It was more than any of them deserved. Tyrion, too, must have been alive, somewhere else. So Jaime hoped, selfishly, that both Brienne and he would live to take part in a marriage dance on Tommen's or Myrcella's wedding in the years to come.

He imagined her in a bright blue dress doing justice to the colour of her eyes. She would be mortified, miss a step and she would end up in his arms, ready and waiting. Right hand was fortunately not required to properly embrace a woman, even one so strong as Brienne.

The Hound's idea for getting the horn appeared _sound,_ and that, in itself, was bothering Jaime. He had known Sandor Clegane for very long, and the plan he told them was just that, sound. Yet it lacked the audacity and a uniquely cruel disregard for all life, sometimes including his own, which was present in the younger Clegane's style of fighting at least since he was twelve. Then again, the man was infamous for telling the truth, and detested elaborate lies more than he loathed the knights and their sacred vows. _So why would he now tell us one?_

Head swarming with doubts, and not a single certainty, Jaime followed Mance Rayder to the top of the wall where Brienne and the Elder Brother were already standing. The Hound was nowhere to be seen. It was decided that Ser Willas would ride out to meet his destiny alone, for too many good men and women were already lost to the army of wights during night.

The morning count of losses also showed that the wood for fire was already getting scarce. They had crops to last a siege of six months, but they only had firewood to burn for another night or two. It hadn't been cold enough in Highgarden in the previous two mild winters to warrant heating of the homes, so there were no provisions made for it. And they had already scavenged part of the wooden furniture of the rich and the poor alike. There were more household items, roof beams, a few acres of rose bushes inside the walls, and a timid godswood, forgotten but standing still, although no one in Highgarden cared much about the old gods. But the crystals of the Seven could not feed the fires, and the wood of the old gods could. Even Mance did not object to that. _"_ In the North they say," he said when Jaime suggested burning the godswood, "those who believe, they say that when the time is right the old gods will open their eyes again. And then the white weirwood will cover all lands again, the red blood of the earth its source and its father."

Jaime leaned on Brienne, very slightly, and was rewarded by a crooked smile and a flash of blue directed at him, before they both stared down as if they had rehearsed the movement. Ser Willas stood alone and nervous in front of the black ship. His horse shrank away from the dragons, or from the dead, who could tell. Euron was nowhere to be seen.

Ser Willas called out, most probably sick of waiting. "I have come, Euron Greyjoy. Let us do this and be done with it."

He nevertheless had to wait a bit more. The onlookers on the battlements did not dare breathe and the tension in the air could be sliced even with a dull bread knife. A company of silent sisters they had saved in the night was lurking between the turrets and the openings to shoot down arrows. Their trade was not in demand: the dead were either burned or they lived on in a state most of them would never have chosen to exist in. A new fashion issued: there were not enough septons in the city so many of those in fear of dying (or living after they would die) sought to relieve their souls of various sorrows by talking to the servants of the Seven, completely forgetting about the particular nature of the duties the silent sisters have been carrying out for centuries. Besides preparing the corpses for burial, they were sworn not to talk. But the holy women did not have it in themselves to refuse the poor and the fearful so they would write down their replies and questions to those who sought the comfort of the Seven.

Jaime's gaze lingered on Brienne when an unknown _presence_ demanded his attention. He didn't know what it was, and no one had spoken to him, all absorbed as they were with what awaited Willas. Jaime wondered if his father would have come up with a better strategy in their position. Despite all his reticence about the Hound's plan, it was the only possible way out they had. Even Mance reluctantly agreed that they had to use Gregor. There was one other feature of the plan which Jaime arrogantly loved and for which he was going to apply himself to the execution of it, heart and soul: the role attributed to Brienne was daring enough to satisfy her nature, young and thirsty for nobility and songs of valour, where certain death loomed, yet it was one of the two roles that guaranteed survival and running away from the city besieged by wights. If the scheme worked, which was far from certain.

Jaime's dagger was sharp again. He stood next to the woman of his choosing, and gazed down, in peace, when the presence disturbed him again. White. Golden. White again. More golden than the stores of gold under the Casterly Rock, not shit out by his father as the smallfolk imagined, but patiently stored by his forebears over the centuries. Some of them even worked hard to obtain the gold. White and gold cloud rested on the wind, far away where the world almost ended. Rejoicing wickedly, it flew back to the gloom around Highgarden.

Jaime shook his mane to chase the odd sensations away. The sleepless night had taken its toll. He had to stop daydreaming and simply stay awake for just a little bit longer.

"Lord Euron," Willas called, almost shy, exposed in the open, alone and horseless before the crumbling walls of his city and the fires that defended it, fed by the determination of its citizens and the timber from their homes.

And the shyness sometimes did what the audacity could not: the One-Eyed Lord of the Krakens appeared on the prow of his dead ship, clad in black, blacker than the night, shining bright black in the greyness of the morning. His red priest wore ruby red robes, his head was bare and his mantle sewn out of smooth black velvet, finer than could be found in all of the Seven Kingdoms.

Behind them, several wights led by Loras Tyrell and Aeron Damphair, Euron's _brother,_ rose up from the belly of the ship, bringing forward on their backs the heavy iron stand where the Horn was perched, gingerly. Jaime observed with rising concern how even the wights took good care not to touch the cursed instrument. _That_ didn't bode well at all for what they planned with Gregor.

It was the only plan they had with remote chance of succeeding. A wave of golden warmth flooded through Jaime's mind, reassuring him of something. He must have been dead tired to keep on dreaming with his eyes open. He shook his head violently. Still, in his visions, he spread golden wings and flew to the sky, where the bright sun was still in existence above the autumn clouds. There was a touch of support, very subtle, on his stump. It woke him up, as always. It was incredible how Brienne cherished his weakness where Cersei had only wanted his strength. The beast that had opened its wings screeched in his chest, and the man who could not roar despite his sigil had many unseemly thoughts, where a pair of legs longer than many a man's would cling to his body as they would engage in a dance different than the one of steel and dying. Wide awake, he looked down again.

Between Euron and his priest stepped a man in heavy chains, unbent and proud. He came forward from the ladder leading to the deck out of the depths of Silence, of his own free will. His facial bones were stoic, iron, a faithful mirror image of His One-Eyed Grace, except that he was much taller and stronger than Euron, who was lithe of body, and quick of mind before Balon banished him from Pyke as far as Jaime knew. And then he still had both eyes.

Victarion Greyjoy walked to his last living brother, and spat right into Euron's face.

**Sandor**

"So, Gregor," Sandor Clegane told his brother placidly, taking hold of an iron chain attached harshly around Gregor's thick neck and under Ser Bonifer's head, anointed with seven oils. "It is you and I again. We have not come to this world together like the lion twins, but we will be leaving it one after another. What say you?"

In the long years when he lived for becoming strong enough in order to _kill_ his brother, the Hound always suspected he might die as a consequence of such fight. The possibility never bothered him. As long as Gregor died first.

"Doesn't that please you?" the Hound asked politely and continued to talk on his own. "It surely pleases me."

The chained abomination had a decency to smile. _That_ was unnatural. The Hound barked a powerful laugh, yanking the chain. What was left of his brother followed him, docile, towards the main city gates, rings of steel clanking on the large cobble stone pavement of the street.

"You know, Gregor," he kept on talking to his brother while they were walking, in a tone the courtiers would use to complain about the weather. "As a boy I wanted a brother who would be clever and teach me everything I should know about the world. Or a strong one who would stand for me until I gained force to stand on my own."

"I got a brother who humiliated me and who tortured me, before he would kill me, like he murdered our sister, and our father," the Hound concluded his considerations, not moving a muscle on his face, grey eyes never wavering from their entirely flat composure. "At least our mother left us before you could kill her too. Ran away with a sweet-tongued trader, our father said. Our maester said she ran away with puppeteers, like our grandfather's grandmother did many years before. It was in mother's blood, the maester said, despite that the poor woman was not a Clegane before marrying our father, so she had no blood in common with our great-great-grandmother either. And I very much doubt that the maester had any idea about what our great-great-grandmother may have done, or not."

"See, Gregor, I listened to the maester when I was a boy and he was changing the dressings which were rotting on my new pretty face. So I wondered if I deserved it all. If I was somehow born evil and twisted, if it was in my blood to run away, or to be burned as a just punishment, or if I have done something in my life to merit such destiny."

"I grew up and I understood. There was no reason why you were wicked or why I was cruel, vicious and strong. There was no reason why I wore my scars, no justification. No reason for what was done to me. You did it because you could. That was all."

Sandor Clegane clenched his fists and made a promise to his brother.

"Don't worry, Gregor," he told the smiling corpse before they approached the exit from the city. "I am more like you than I would wish, but I am still not you. I will grant you one thing. You will die as you, and not as this scoundrel of the Faith."

Ser Bonifer would have hunted them down for Baelish in Harrenhal, all of them, little bird included. That was enough to attract the Hound's rage even if he didn't already harbour a strong dislike for the perfumed liars of the Seven. The Elder Brother, brother whom they called Benjen for the show, Sansa, most likely her father, old Ser Barristan, and very few other people he encountered over the years were nothing like that. Those people _did_ believe in gods and their innate goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary. They chose to believe where Sandor Clegane could not. His faith was burned down with his face, never to be reborn from the ashes.

"Soon, brother," the Hound rasped merrily, mouth curving in a tremendously appalling smile, "you will quit laughing. You had best enjoy it until then."

**Sansa**

Sansa had slept too much during her journey to Highgarden. It was good, because since the terrible moment when they arrived, she couldn't close her eyes. First an awful ugly man wanted to rape the two older women sharing Sansa's caravan. She mindlessly stepped before them, understanding too late that the only thing she earned with that was that she was going to be his victim first. Never seeing the man she came to see, intact. _Stupid little bird,_ she thought of herself in the words of the man she wanted. The injustice of it angered her spirit, subduing her fear. In lucidity, she let the cloth she used to cover her wound be seen, healed for two nights already. The man was more stupid than her; he mistook old blood for moonblood and pushed her away.

Then, it was the Hound. He had to be there and cut the horrible man down in one ferocious sweep of his giant sword. Towering and fearsome. She almost forgot how tall he truly was. His scars twisted in the moonlight as he did what he loved most, in the words of his own choosing. _Killing._ Sansa found she could not meet him, she could not meet his eyes, she could not tell him what she came to Highgarden to do. She came to give him a gift, but now that she had seen him in his overwhelming unrestrained presence, she turned too cowardly to proceed. _How can I want such a man?_ she thought. _He's dangerous and rude, and he's not even hiding it._

She remembered Septa Tyene and her injuries. Although the septa did not seem to regret those, but something else she did or didn't do that Sansa could not fully comprehend. _Maybe all women are stupid and they want what is harmful for them,_ Sansa thought, remembering with sickness how she used to love Joffrey.

Her fear of the Hound in Highgarden was different than when she was afraid for her life in King's Landing, or when she learned to be obedient and scared of Petyr. It was a new kind of fear, one that kept her mind wide awake, and made her stomach freeze.

The hand of a silent sister was an opportune distraction in the night. Sansa ran away from the Hound, jumping on another wagon, before she would have to face him, craving more time to understand what she wished of him.

It was not like any of them could leave Highgarden any time soon. The city was surrounded, its people afloat between the madness of bravery and that of despair.

It was good that not all of the silent sisters could write. And Sansa Stark could not sleep so she spent the rest of the night and the early morning mute under her robes, listening to the confessions of people and writing out words of consolation. With a belated thought she understood that had the war been a different one, she would be handling the dead in a role she had hastily chosen for herself. Grateful for a turn of tide which did not require her to perform the necessary but no less repulsive rite of preserving the bodies, she heard some more confessions, hoping they would mute her vivid thoughts.

She learned so much of what she missed from the poor people wishing to save their lives. Sansa knew that the Seven most likely would not help them, as they haven't helped her in the past, but she went on writing them words of comfort all the same.

She heard how Ser Loras died bravely, and how his brothers Willas and Garlan would try their luck next. She heard how Mance Rayder defended the city where no one else could, followed by a company of strange grim men who have ridden to Highgarden all the way from the North. A fiddler and a singer were composing a rhyme of a beautiful lady knight protecting the city, orange petals sparkling from her hair. The poor admired the North, believing it has come to their aid, and Sansa Stark was proud although their belief was not true.

It was the winter subdued by the work of evil magic that had come to claim them.

In the dim morning, she found herself on the wall, only one more woman in a contingent of the silent sisters. Standing by. Watching. Waiting. As girls who were to become women were taught to do. Somewhat calmed down, her eyes went searching for Sandor, her reticence less with the weak light of the day. The tender memories of having been in his arms in King's Landing erased the image of a frightening warrior in full swing. _Everyone else is here except for him, why?_ The familiar old fear _for_ him filled up her soul, older than her young body, battered at the edges.

Then, she noticed the Hound from above. Walking what was left of _his brother_ towards the city gates. Gregor was on a leash, just like a dog. _That_ was unlike Sandor Clegane. By now she had known him well enough. She could imagine him killing his brother in cold blood or boiling rage, but she found it hard to believe that the Hound could or would use him as Petyr did with people. A vague thought occurred to her after hearing out so many penitents of the Seven. _Would he confess to me? Would he share something if he didn't know who I was?_ The desire to speak to Sandor without him recognising her took hold of Sansa when Lord Euron Greyjoy's hollow voice rang coldly from beneath, frightening both the living and the dead.

"Ser Willas Tyrell, welcome!" Euron greeted his visitor with malice more measured than a balanced stroke of a sword wrought of Valyrian steel. "A proper lord would have come out yesterday to welcome his noble guests. To share bread and salt."

 _I will never marry Willas now,_ Sansa thought and she was sad. Not for not marrying him but because no one deserved to die the way they told her Ser Loras did. Burning from inside out, alive, in heart wrenching pain. So far, Willas seemed kind and lordly, good to his people, who might cry over his passing.

"Welcome, Lord Greyjoy," Willas said, slowly, not awarding the Usurper of his lands the title of His Grace, the name all yearned for and very few deserved from what Sansa had seen.

"You are a cripple not worthy to blow the horn of the dragonlords," Lord Euron judged, wiping the spit that had landed on his face moments earlier from a tall man in chains thicker than Gregor's. "And you have offended my benevolence by resisting your destiny last night. You are thus forcing me to show you my strength beyond any doubt. Behold!" Lord Euron tenderly kissed the cheek of the man in chains. "My brother Victarion! I gave him this mighty horn and I charged him to bring me back three dragons and the most beautiful woman in the world to be my bride!"

"Alas, he failed me. He brought only two dragons and a red priest, letting the third one, the mightiest of all, escape with the woman which was rightfully mine."

Lord Euron spoke with unhidden passion. "Yet, he did bring me dragons, for he is my brother. Any lesser man would not have been able to deliver this service to a true dragonlord that I am."

"Victarion, brother, I love you dearly," Lord Euron said to the chained man, kissing his other cheek. "I love you so much that I will give you one more present. And please, do not remind me of how all my gifts are poisoned."

Sansa had no doubt that was exactly what they were, recalling the choking death woven of amethysts she had worn in her hair.

"I'll give you the blessing of heroic death," Lord Euron said in a kingly voice.

Victarion wanted to spit again, but the red priest touched a red jewel he had been holding in his hands. Something in the prisoner's neck constricted. Victarion stood still, glancing at the red rings around the horn. "Beloved brother," he replied to Lord Euron, haughty, unbroken. "I deserve the dragons and the woman you dare to speak of more than you ever will. Do not be surprised if I become the rightful master of the horn and your new army after you make me do this. I have always been stronger than you."

"That you were," Lord Euron said. "But it will be of no use, brother. You should have done as you were told, that is all. A woman, and three dragons. This horn is bound to me by magic that cannot be easily broken. I have claimed it for myself and suffered the consequences."

"And now, now," the one-eyed leader yelled to the walls of Highgarden, "there is one among you miserable rats who may be the true master of the horn! Moqorro, the priest, had seen it in the flames of his god, which often deceive, but rarely do they lie. Give me that man! Or woman, makes no matter. Give them to me! And I will enlist you to my army as I have promised! Fail to do so, and the dragons will scorch your city to the ground until not a single stone will be left unmelted in this new Harrenhal of the south, cursed, abandoned and dead."

"And when it comes to you, dearest brother," Lord Euron faced Victarion again. "It will give me joy when you squirm and pray to die faster as the fire is eating you slowly from within. You will beg and I will watch. And by your death I will be stronger than ever, for you will now surrender your life force to me, whether you wish it or not."

Sansa Stark did not look when Victarion Greyjoy blew the horn.

Sansa Stark did not see. She did not hear when Victarion screamed, just like Lord Euron foretold, or worse.

Sansa Stark could not bring herself to care when Lord Euron proclaimed his new strength and when a white dragon approached him and let him touch its long snout, thinning at the end.

Sansa Stark stared at Sandor Clegane, who observed Victarion's cruel death from the safety of the vault of the city gates, never letting go a chain of his brother. The man she followed south against any better judgement on her part turned paler than the fresh parchment, whiter than the clean bedding, greyer than the dim daylight of the day that did not deserve that name. He wore a face Sansa must have had when Joffrey executed and humiliated her father for all to see, except that he didn't scream. The Hound gazed at Lord Euron in mutiny, with murder in his eyes, while the ironborn leader continued _torturing_ his brother, needlessly, as if it were the most pleasant thing someone could do. She was too far up to see Sandor's eyes clearly but she could imagine the anger that must have been in them, stormier than the sea Petyr used to sail a ship on to better steal her. The Hound stared at Lord Euron until the last throes of the victim resounded over the green fields inhabited by the dead. Then he retreated back where he came from, a shadow in the shadows of a grey morning, further obscured by the dark form of his eight foot tall companion.

Sansa looked at Victarion, dead, and wondered if on the morrow he would also carry the iron stand of the cursed horn with Ser Loras and another unfortunate man whom Sansa didn't know, but who visibly grieved for Victarion, unlike Lord Euron, his brother. Lord Euron robbed the horn from Victarion's stiff hands and laid it back to the pedestal where it was taken from, illustrating his ability to handle it without dying from its magic. Although he did not blow it, and Sansa noticed that the red priest pressed again the same invisible red jewel which must have prevented Victarion from his last act of spitting.

**Jaime**

"I wouldn't wish to be the rightful owner of the Blasted Horn," Jaime told Brienne. They were supposed to descend and join the Hound to set their plan in motion but Euron's improvisation kept them where they were, stunned still with the turn of events.

"I doubt that any of us is its master," Brienne was of the opinion. "He told us that to frighten us because we defied him. And we will do it again as long as there is wood to burn and arms that can fight!"

"That's very admirable, wench," Jaime said, chasing fresh white and golden sensation away from his mind succumbing to exhaustion. Or maybe it was the influence of the stone candle, and watching purple flames for too long created golden reflections in one's mind. "Look," he said, perplexed, "not all of his threats were idle."

A white dragon, elegant and long, glided on the grey air, _colour of the House Stark_ , Jaime thought, distracted, finding the colour of the bleak north appropriate for the arrival of doom to the southern kingdoms. The magnificent beast landed in front of Euron, and nuzzled his hand that had touched the Horn, in submission.

Euron smiled, pleased and gratified. The eye he had glimmered bright. The animal turned to face the city walls, gracing them with a wave of smoke and a deep roar. As it gazed to the part of the wall where the mummers' company was standing, it put a paw in its mouth, bit it hard and nearly bit it off.

"The beast resists the will of Lord Euron!" Brienne exclaimed. "It will harm itself rather than obey!"

As far as Jaime knew, Brienne knew next to nothing about the dragons, but she did draw his attention to the fact that the dragon was harming his _right_ paw, not his left one. _Don't do that,_ Jaime thought absurdly, _you will want to have both paws no matter which lord you serve. Or you may want it for mating._ He wondered how the dragons did that among themselves before their females laid eggs. He was glad that Brienne could not hear his thoughts, getting crazier and crazier on the matter of dragons. About the white one in any case. _Not golden, luckily,_ Jaime thought as the gale of warm sparkling wind under the open skies kept twirling in his head.

The dragon released his paw and bowed to Euron, his master. The animal spread its leathery wings in the air, and _there, there was the gold!_ Jaime's mouth sprang wide open. A thousand golden strings or veins, forming thin intricate patterns, scintillated like jewels on the bottom side of the beast's feathered limbs and its soft-looking belly.

The dragon flew directly to Highgarden. It glided effortlessly within the safety of the cool air of the morning. Nearing the walls, it scorched one of the city towers, burning hard stone and soft flesh until no one was left alive, and the screams of the dying made the dark day become blacker still.

The tower was not even 50 feet away from where Jaime and Brienne stood and its fall left a large opening that would have to be protected by fires at night, devouring the wood they didn't have.

"My army will be ready to enter your city at sunset," Euron said. "So go on burning it down if you want to last another night. It will be your last one, I swear to you. And tomorrow, bring me the man, or the woman, who think they can challenge me, the rightful owner of this horn, and the only living Lord of Dragons other than myself."

With that, Euron retreated to the bottom of his ship, leaving his army, his dragons and the corpse of his brother. The red priest stepped forward, raising both of his arms high up in the air. A dense irregularly shaped black shadow sprouted from his fingernails and travelled towards the sky. Darkening the air it went, growing wider as a thick unnatural rain cloud, unfolding its wings all over the condemned city.

"It will get as dark as during the Long Night," Brienne whispered next to Jaime, and it sounded like something she must have read once. They stood as close to each other as the propriety allowed, almost cheek to cheek, so that the warmth was shared between their faces. They witnessed the end of Westeros as they knew it, and the birth of a new continent, more terrible, perhaps. Or simply a world they would yet have to discover.

Jaime's sadness was exquisite when he would think of how many people lost their lives in the tower that was still smoking. He was oppressed by sorrow as few times turn his attention and his brain away, he looked at the white dragon again. The beast paid no heed to Euron any longer after it obeyed his unspoken command. It lifted fast flight and directed the splendour of its wings far away from the city, where its green coloured brother welcomed it with a shrill screech.

 _The greeting of dragons,_ Jaime thought with admiration, not noticing that Brienne was ushering him down the steep stairs.

Euron was gone, and their plan with Gregor would have to wait for another day.

For the night, their fires had to burn.

**Sandor**

"Get out of my sight," the Hound told a pair of silent sisters, nursing a jug of colourless piss. He no longer had Gregor, who would be in care of Jaime Lannister until his meeting with Euron would come to pass. Sandor Clegane wanted wine, but when the innkeep of the first tavern he found came to serve him, he only asked for water.

"Begone," he repeated to the two women who had been stalking him for a while, but the fat one only moved steadily toward him, and the slender one followed suit.

"What do you want?" he bellowed, his scars in the open, waiting for them to run away.

The fat one sat across him and the slender one next to her. The fat one _wrote_ a message to him. " _My sister is young and innocent",_ the paper read. " _She took a vow of silence and she cannot write, but she can listen. Her ear is kind and known to ease the hearts of man in war. A man strong as you may need some nourishment for his soul. To better defend us all."_

For a heavy-bodied woman with thick fingers, the silent sister wrote faster than Mance Rayder.

"I need _nothing,_ " the Hound thundered in a low threatening voice, bringing his face inches away from the slender silent companion across the table. The younger woman did not move, and then, he understood. It was the woman he saved the night before. "There is no need to thank me either," he breathed through the slits for air of her opulent robes, and then, she did recoil, trembling. Satisfied, the Hound sank back and added. "Another innocent girl wanted to thank me years ago. I didn't want her gratitude. The dog merely does what he is good at, every now and then."

The slender woman nodded to the fat one who wrote. " _We apologise for disturbing your peace, warrior. My sister bids you enjoy your water. She will pray to the Seven to grant strength to your hand._ "

"No use praying either," he said then, suddenly not so eager to end the conversation. "Maybe another will pray for me if the ravens bring her news of how I died in the city of roses."

 _"We are lucky not to know the time nor the hour of our passing,"_ the large woman wrote. _"Do not despair."_

"I would have died for less, before," the Hound said. "Now I will follow the Stranger gladly."

The younger woman hugged the fat one tightly and they buzzed like buggering black insects under the shroud of their robes. Apparently the vows allowed them to talk to each other. Or the silent sisters spat on those too, like the knights did.

 _"Why are you afraid to live?"_ the next message said.

"I'm not!" he refuted the ridiculous notion.

_"Then why are you throwing your life away?"_

"Not doing that either," he said and stood abruptly on his feet. He didn't need those two insipid creatures to question his decisions.

"Pray for me if you must," he said, rattling the sentence that followed faster than he would wield a sword. Embarrassed that he had let it slip past his lips at all, he nevertheless let it roll, like a head of an opponent he would cut off in battle.

"I will die to save this city, and with it, everything I hold dear," Sandor Clegane said, and stormed out of the tavern, swifter than a dragon could fly.

The air smelled of _burning_ and the bloody blue roses. All the streets looked the same, leading nowhere. The city was drenched in dark tones of grey, the drawing shadows of the evening becoming thicker and blacker with every passing moment.

On his way to the castle, Sandor Clegane passed the sight of a godswood in flames. The cloud of smoke above it smelled sharp, and fruity, as no other tree would when consumed by fire. A few commoners were helping the Elder Brother, who still held a burning torch in his left arm. He must have been the one to set the weirwood alight, the one to ruin what was left of the old gods in the south. He looked fallen in his countenance as if he were burying his mother. In the odd light, the monk's red-wrapped face shone like a snow white blazon of the Kingsguard, illuminated softly against the background of the rearing darkness. The Hound noticed, for the first time ever, that the Elder Brother must have been handsome once. Dark quiet eyes on a pale face with the slightest tone of amber, grieving.

"It is not your gods you killed," the Hound told him, as if it weren't obvious. "It are trees, no more, no less. We need wood."

"I wonder," the Elder Brother said. "In the old days before the Light of the Seven was brought to us from across the water, how many people of Highgarden have come here to pronounce their marriage vows?"

"That is not for you to know," the Hound said.

"Even the birds left me, when I started the fire," the monk denounced, gesturing to the sky which had slowly turned so dark that the men could barely see each other outside the reach of the flames. There would be no moon visible that night, that much was certain.

"You should take joy in that," the Hound said. "Your ravens have been persecuting us as it was. If you truly miss them, I reckon they will be back when you leave this place."

The monk smiled, scraping his head where the old injury must have bothered him again. The Hound took his leave as a good soldier; he was to sleep first and the others would come later, in turns, one by one, after they had helped setting their share of fires.

So he dragged his feet and the rest of his body to the set of rooms on the ground floor wing of the Tyrells' castle, always kept ready and clean for the noble guests, where Willas had allowed the mummers to rest, in payment for their defence of his city.

The chamber he was offered was spacious, better than any Joffrey would have given him when he was the king's dog. It must have been opening to the garden full of cursed blue flowers. He could smell them, and the fresh air of the night, but he could not see them. The castle stood high up in the city and the scent of burning did not reach it properly, a distant current of ruin and despair. The wind suddenly snuffed the only torch in the corridor when the Hound entered the chamber. He had to touch the walls to find his way in complete darkness. There was a bed, a large one.

 _A featherbed,_ he concluded.

It wasn't cold. He kicked out his boots and most of his clothing, laying down on his bare back. He could not remember when it was the last time he slept on so soft a thing.

The wind blew hard through the chamber. Or maybe it was something, or someone, walking in from the garden side.

"Who's there?" he asked, but the air could not talk.

He closed his eyes and the world was equally dark as when he had them open.

The wind stirred again and this time the dog in him was more alert.

"Who is it?" he growled. "Show yourself!"

A person was next to him. He grabbed a rough portion of cotton, and a warm body underneath.

"It's me," a voice whispered, the voice that couldn't be there.

His arms took hold of the intruder in full knowledge it could not be Sansa, and immediately recognised the attire of the silent sister. _So that was the way of it._ The stupid woman who sought him in the inn was grateful in a way a whore would be. He wouldn't mind it on another occasion but on that night he wanted to sleep only with his memories.

Of Sansa on Stranger in front of him, letting him do as he pleased, scars or not, as the fireflies lit the way.

Of Sansa kissing him as if he were a true hero from her songs, and not a lonely monster.

Of Sansa, no longer a maid, who melted under his fingers as if she would have let him do anything he wanted if only they had more time.

The sweet memories made the anger at the fraud he was facing swell huge in his chest, so he snarled at the impertinent woman.

"Didn't your _sister_ say you were young and innocent? Didn't _I_ tell you that you didn't need to thank me?"

"What if I were someone else?" the whisper was insistent, and the Hound's ears equally insisted on cheating him, telling him it was her.

Sansa, in Highgarden, on the featherbed.

"She is not here," he said, putting some distance between them, while he still kept his head.

"I will deceive you that I am her," the woman whispered.

The distance between him and the illusion of his mind suddenly unbearable, Sandor closed it again, offering the ghost of his imagination a whisper of his own: "If you do that, woman, there's no telling what I could do. Leave!"

But his arms had made that impossible already, and she didn't struggle to leave them, much on the contrary.

"I will make you believe that it is me who you want to pray for you," she said.

"Alas, if you do that, woman," he said, incoherent, as the curves of her body came to life in his hands and the rough fabric slowly disappeared.

"I will leave you a favour, come morrow," she murmured. "You'll find it when I am gone. Like once you had left me with nothing but a bloody cloak."

He didn't believe he could ever possibly be taken by such blessed deep joy being with _any_ other woman than Sansa, and Sansa was not there.

"I hope you will find it in your heart to bring my favour back to me."

"Sansa," he begged. "It can't be you. Don't lie to me, please."

"I will make you see the truth, that my hair is auburn and that my eyes are blue," she deceived him so sweetly that he forgot where he was. He was hearing Sansa's voice, and it was Sansa in his arms where he was still alive, and still a man.

So he went to show her that, while they still had time, not thinking of any consequences of his mindless actions.

**Sansa**

It hurt much worse than a dagger did, sliding over her tummy.

A different pain, blunt, echoing with warmth from where it started, but hurting nevertheless. Unthinkable and unbearable closeness. Unusual, strong, real. More real than anything. Sensations running over, thoughts abandoned, courtesies forgotten.

Sansa shivered, instinctively.

She kissed him again and again for reassurance, grabbing both of his cheeks to make him come closer, covering the entire length of her body with his. She did not mind the pressure, welcoming its challenge. His body, an anchor, at the point of no return.

Soon, it was yet another thing entirely. They were joined beyond measure of what she thought possible. When he moved, she moved after him, wanting to contain him.

A first sound came from him then, in the growing darkness. A grunt, a wail, a prayer.

She wished so much that she could see him, see all of him, see how he was and where they were joined, see if the intensity of what she was exposed to would have shown also on his face of sculpted, twisted stone.

She imagined that it would. It had to.

He loved her. Of that, Sansa was certain. She didn't want to think now of how much she loved him, or even less for how long. _Forever,_ a thought surged, unwanted. Love was not a poison, but it was a danger all the same. For love could be lost, and Sansa had learned that better than many others.

She was dropped back to the featherbed when he moved up again. It was not pleasing, so she placed her legs on his shoulders and followed his body, sweat, smell and touch. It was better.

He bleated weakly, his bark gone like her courtesies in the overarching darkness.

She thought it would be over soon. He was well inside her so she presumed it was done. What was done in marriage bed. And outside of it, more often than not, from what she had learned.

But he, he…

He set her legs back down, and claimed her mouth again before conquering her breasts as he never did before, warm and tingling between his lips. Hands roamed firmly over her. Then, _between_ where her body and his were one. It was taking time. Their joint movement slow and deliberate. She was his lute, his high harp. The strings of her body making no sound, other than rapid breathing.

She pressed to him, to his hand, to the part of him that was inside her.

Until it was there.

The sea. Washing over.

Its waves. Crashing over.

"Sandor," she said after, not knowing if he had heard her, not caring if he did. "I wish I could see you now." With that, he shuddered violently, covering the crown of her head with his soft silky hair. And she discovered she had been crying against his chest. Boneless, edgeless, soft. Drowning in the sweetest thing that there ever was. That there ever would be for her, she suspected.

She didn't know how much time had passed when she woke in his arms. It was still dark. Her head nested on his shoulder, and the desire to make water reigned strong. Sandor breathed in, and he breathed out. Asleep by the sound of it.

 _Good,_ she thought, but it hadn't been good at all.

She came to give him a gift, not knowing she would receive a gift in return.

Leaving him was much harder than she thought it would be, and the temptation to stay sweet and overwhelming. She knew there would be blood on the sheets come morning. There had to be but she could not see it, or find it by touch in the marvel of his embrace.

Somehow, she made herself stand up, a daughter of ice, equally stubborn as her forefathers.

She found her garments on the floor, hoping he would see what they had done with first light, if the light was not entirely gone from the world. Determined that it was the only way to make him wish to live, to reconfirm the truth of their love, she ventured blindly into the elegant corridors of the castle, in search of the silent sisters' quarters, where she would wait as was the fate of women. She would not deprive him of doing the man's duty by her wailing.

 _It was all that I could have done,_ _my love,_ she sighed. _The rest will be up to you._


	37. It Was Her

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Sandor wakes up, and new evil is brewing in King's Landing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The mood of this and the next chapter have been greatly inspired by the song If I have to go, by Tom Waits.

**Sandor**

It had to be the endless expanse of flames, the molten seas of fire, burning bright. The Hound was captured in a dream from which he could not wake, on the day when the rest of his yet unburned body would be consumed by the dread of the horn, rightfully belonging to the long dead dragonlords. In the vastness there were words he should remember, helping words he should heed to, in his guts the dog knew that he should. The dog was feral, but he always survived.

Yet in his sleep the blaze devoured everything on its rolling path, and no words ever came.

When Sandor Clegane awoke, relieved to escape from the expanding hell of his dreams, there was no one in his bed, but there was the Elder Brother sleeping in the garden.

The bald monk was folded like a child in his mother's womb on an elaborately sculpted bench where the immobile stone roses intertwined with the living ones of winter. The morning was a dark, dull grey, charged with the pungent smell of flowers. They could see each other again without the light of the torches, so it must have been daytime. Several ravens roosted on the rose bush above the Elder Brother, but the magnificent white-headed bird with grey eyes that had been watching the Hound was nowhere to be seen.

"Why didn't you wake me to have your turn in bed as we have agreed?" the Hound asked him rudely.

The monk opened his vivid dark eyes and answered, more crimson in his face than the red scarf he took to wearing, after he prevailed in the confrontation with the red priest, or with his god. "You were not alone."

His words struck the Hound as the Smith's hammer, erasing any remaining drowsiness and lingering nightmares from his strong limbs.

He understood why his cock felt so light, and his heart so full.

 _I bedded Sansa,_ he grinned half in joy and half in despair. _But if I did, where is she?_

He remembered every touch and every movement of his body before falling asleep, divine moments of unequalled fulfilment. He ran back to the room in several huge leaps and gazed at the bed reverently, as if it were the Mother's Altar and he still a child that believed in the Seven.

"Sansa!" he cried. Adjusting his own grey eyes to the remaining shadows of the barely existing light. A rusting stain spread peacefully over the immaculately embroidered bedding of the House Tyrell.

A sign, a proof, a witness.

Of a wound such as he would have never wanted to inflict upon her. He contemplated the size of his body in a completely new fashion as his hands trembled with dread. Sansa was tall for a woman, but he, he was a giant of a man, only surpassed by his brother.

"Sansa!" he cried out louder, refusing to believe what his eyes had seen, rejecting a _different_ explanation. _I will leave you a favour come morning,_ he remembered how she had told him, _like you once left me a bloody cloak._ "You can't be! You couldn't have been!"

A different voice, young and stern, crept back to his tortured mind which had a habit of storing events and phrases in separate mental chests, helping him to survive in the court for as long as he did. He saw himself cutting his way towards Sansa with dull-coloured sharp steel, at the court of King Aegon, who was speaking. The young pretender said that Sansa's marriage to the Imp could be dissolved _once a septa would prove her maidenly innocence_ … Sounding like he was mentioning a solid truth of what he had had for breakfast that day. The Hound disregarded it then. Aegon could not know the truth, could he?

All the sweet memories of Sansa's behaviour towards him on the road from the Quiet Isle, and in King's Landing, made their appearance bathed in an entirely different light. The confusion he took for a woman's game shone brightly for what it was, in truth. Sansa didn't know what she was doing, could not know what to do with a man. She had heard about it, but she had never done it before, by miracle, or a whim of fate.

Or he had just deflowered a very young silent sister in a moment of utter folly, recreating in his last moments the woman he desired more than anything. If that was the way of it, he only had one consolation. The woman was as willing as he had been, or he didn't know anything about women at all. There would be no regrets.

Sandor wished he had real family, someone whom he could ask for advice. He remembered Gregor and laughed like a Stranger would, cursed and deadly, at the thought of honestly _talking_ to his brother. He grasped the bloodied sheet in his huge hands, rolling it in a bundle to take along. On an impulse, he sniffed it. _No other woman would smell like Sansa,_ he was certain.

 _I stand alone,_ he thought, determined to seek out the silent sisters and kill a few of them if he must, in order to establish the truth.

Except that the Elder Brother must have been at the door for awhile, still ashamed. Sandor hoped the monk didn't hear him screaming Sansa's name, and that he had hidden the incriminating bedding on time. _If it was Sansa,_ he thought, _he couldn't have seen her. It was too dark,_ he thought, eager to preserve little bird's modesty from the prying eyes of the Faith. _If it was her…._ And it had to be her for him to reach to the seven heavens, or so he wished to believe. He wished to believe that above anything, but he needed much more than faith.

He must know for certain.

"It is understandable, even if for me it's difficult to fully comprehend," the Elder Brother offered meekly. "The siege, the battles, you are a man, and you have never made any vows…"

"What do you think, brother?" the Hound asked of the monk with uncharacteristic melancholy, realizing that the brother of the Faith came as close to family as anyone could in his case. "Would the Lady Stark mourn me if I were not to return from Highgarden?"

"I cannot say that," the Elder Brother answered in earnest and the Hound's crest fell. "All I can say is that a woman can forgive many things to a man. Things that most men would never be able to forgive, or at least, entirely forget. No matter how wrong or unjust that may be."

 _He thinks I betrayed her,_ the Hound thought, still staring at the monk, a mute plea for help dripping from his eyes, so strong that the force of his gaze could carry Euron's ship without the helping shoulder of a single wight.

"How in seven hells would you know?" he scorned him.

"I was married twice, remember? Before the vows," the Elder Brother admitted, eyes shy like a maiden's. "I can also say that I did overhear the end of her conversation with Mance Rayder about most likely, you, in King's Landing, after you walked away."

"And?" the Hound growled.

"Well," the monk stuttered, "she believed you might want to die for her."

"She was right," Sandor Clegane couldn't agree more.

"She didn't want you to," the Elder Brother did his best to finish what he started. "She wanted you to live for her and…"

But the Hound didn't listen to him any longer. He would not bend to anyone. Reckless, unstoppable, he was off to find the buggering silent sisters in a little time he still had before heading to meet his destiny.

**Tommen**

King Aegon, Sixth of His Name, received young Tom Waters in the hall of the Iron Throne. Some of the dragon skulls have been brought back from the cellars to decorate the walls, banishing the ornate tapestries of the stag, and the lion. The work was half done, and that was exactly how Aegon felt. Half done in everything, never truly accomplished.

The entire company of his sworn brothers of the Kingsguard stood guard in front of all doors and crevices, so that no little birds of Varys or other illustrious members of the court could have come too close to their king. The smallfolk turned to calling them the Young Falcons, after their newly elected Lord Commander, Robert Arryn of the Vale.

"Your Grace," Tom Waters said bowing deeply to the ground, not betraying in his countenance that only a short time ago he was the one seated on the Iron Throne, receiving signs of loyalty. "I am yours to command."

"Rise, Tom," Aegon said. "I called you before me for a reason. I am riding to Highgarden, and I will leave the throne in your charge while I am gone. I suspect you could find sitting on it more familiar than most."

Tommen rose with wonder and trepidation in his green eyes. He was recognised and his disguise was broken. "What would a humble bastard know about it, Your Grace?"

"As much or more as an heir to the dead prince raised across the water, whom at least someone in this court wants to see as dead as his father before the month is over," Aegon's eyes reflected the same fear of betrayal as Tommen's did in the fields facing the Dragon Gate when everyone abandoned him, and the green-eyed boy understood.

"You may have also called me to ask a question then," Tommen assumed further, examining Aegon's eyes, hoping he was not too far off the target. "Ask it. Whatever it is, I will answer with such honour as I have and as I have been raised with. The honour does not reside in blood, pure or not, Your Grace."

"I concur," Aegon said. "And you are right. I do want to ask you a question. They say that the blades the Iron Throne is made of are meant to cut the flesh of the ruler not worthy to sit upon it. I can confirm that there may be some truth to this old legends told by the crones. What say you?"

"The Usurper, Tommen, would say," Tommen said warily, "that for all his bastard blood the throne has never done such a thing to him. Incredible as it might seem. He could swear on the lives of his real mother and father that he was telling the truth. So either the old stories are wrong, or the throne has found him worthy, despite that he was only a pretender."

"I see," Aegon thought, somewhat disappointed. Soon, he regained the composure and royalty he so freely possessed in Tommen's opinion. "Than I am more than right in letting you rule in my stead. My Kingsguard will not go either, much to their dislike, but I will take only men of age to face Euron Greyjoy in the field of battle. Jeyne will ride with me. Her sister says she is a woman grown, and she's the only person I trust to guard my life with hers if need arises, especially with the Kingsguard staying here. Jon Connington will help you out as much as he can. He is the only one outside my Kingsguard you can fully trust. He, and Septa Lemore, but she is to remain confined in her quarters until I return. It might be safer that way, for all."

"You are wrong, Your Grace," Tommen said. "You cannot trust anyone. It is so, and worse than that for those who are made to sit the Iron Throne. The mother of the Usurper Tommen tried to teach him this wisdom, but he wouldn't believe her. It was one of the few things, maybe the only thing where she was right. "For your enemies may find the way to corrupt your honest councillors, until they work for them, and not for you."

"That may well be," Aegon said. "But I will still endeavour to rule with honour and honesty, and so will you while I am gone, wiser for your experiences. My aunt refused to join me. She wouldn't even see me when I came begging for her help. If I do not return, you will surrender the throne to someone whose claim is worthy, if that is within your powers to do."

"You have my word, Your Grace," Tommen said, feeling the gaze of the dead dragons on his helmed head. They seemed to question him for treason in their own way, and, satisfied of finding none in his young soul, in Tommen's mind they snorted, and turned their skulls away.

**Gendry**

Not a day after King Aegon was gone, a large wooden construction started to rise slowly in front of the Mud Gate, chasing away the fishermen and their trade. Gendry sat near the muddy water where the Blackwater Rush mingled with the sea, in a company of Nymeria, wishing that Arya were awake and could be with them. She was smart and she would know what the men were building before Gendry's unlearned eyes.

"I wonder what they are doing," he told the wolf. "My healing stomach tells me this is something we should mention to Daenerys. I know it deep down in my bastard veins. But we should try to know more before we run like mad dogs to her ships." _Or crazy stags,_ he thought, yet he still found it very difficult to identify with his presumed father's sigil.

Ever since Sansa disappeared, and all the other mummers were gone, Gendry took a strange liking in talking to the wolf. It seemed almost as if Nymeria could hear him, and she reacted to his words, in her own way. And he was sure the direwolf wanted Arya to wake up at least as much, or even more than he wanted it himself.

It was not a scaffolding for hanging or decapitation, that much was clear.

Many men dressed in roughspun robes of the Faith were running around, busy with too many tasks. They were building a pyre, of lonely twigs and dry grass, looming high above the land, on a high pedestal of wood that would be visible for many leagues away, if the woods were not so close to King's Landing on all sides. Each wooden pillar holding a dais where the pyre was being built was shaped as one face of the seven faces of one god. In an outline of the city and its surroundings, the height of the structure and the elaborate carvings of the carpentry appeared exaggerated, serving only to boost the earthly power of the High Septon and his crystal-armed followers. Gendry was of a mind to use his warhammer and smash the crystal pommels of their swords, but that wouldn't have done any good. Since the champion of the Faith won over the cursed champion of the Whore Queen, the reputation of the High Septon, who had chosen the Elder Brother, was unequalled in splendour and importance in the eyes of the smallfolk.

There were benches foreseen for spectators, and a large stake set in the growing heap of wood.

Nymeria suddenly licked Gendry's face and ran towards one of the workers, toppling the poor man over. Her action forced Gendry to follow her, arms bare, hammer ready to use.

The attacked man struggled to fight off the beast, but he was no match for her. Gendry considered hitting the wolf with his weapon, only to calm her down, but as soon he approached them, the wolf sat on her hind legs and howled like a good dog.

"I am sorry," Gendry said to the confused man. "My dog seems to like you."

"Dog, you say," man mumbled. "More like one of these monsters from the north, those ungodly animals, larger than wolves. I tell you, lad, winter will do for us all. We just have to wait a little bit longer.

"Where are you from, to speak like that of winter?" Gendry wondered.

"From the Neck. Ran away from there when the ironborn came. Ran all the way through the riverlands when the Mountain came. With Faith I stopped running. Now I'm here and I can eat every day, so far."

"What is this?" Gendry asked, pointing at the structure.

"The High Septon intends to burn to death the septa who raised the king. He has proof she has betrayed the Faith of the Seven and became a follower of the Lord or Light. She may have also killed a lady who disappeared from the court. King Aegon himself commanded it."

"But the king is gone," Gendry said and Nymeria snarled.

"An order is written _and_ signed by his hand," the man whispered and looked around. "And there is worse. Lord Baelish has said, and some sparrow has overheard it, that the fallen septa is no other but Lady Ashara Dayne. And King Aegon, he may not be a son of Prince Rhaegar but a bastard of Lady Ashara and Brandon Stark instead. Imagine only! She may have fooled Lord Connington that her son was Rhaegar's son all those years ago. She is told to be a very smart and an even more wicked woman."

"So Aegon will execute his own mother?" Gendry asked in shock, pondering how it was Varys, and not Septa Lemore who saved Aegon from the Mountain, so at least one part of the pious gossip did not match the truth. "If that is true and if Aegon knows it, what kind of king does that make him?"

"A prudent one," the man said. "Lord Baelish knows many things. If he said so for anyone to hear, than it is not very far away from the truth. What better way for a king to hide the truth about his bastard origin? What do you think King Joffrey would have done to hide his, the Seven bless his soul? Forgive me for mentioning his name, for we should speak only good of the dead."

Another worker jumped in, posing a large carpentry beam with a piece of the face of the Stranger temporarily to the ground. "If Aegon ordered it," he said, "why did they then kill all the ravens? Tom Waters wanted to send the raven after the king when the High Septon announced he would pass such sentence this morning, but not a single one could be found... They have flown away or they lie dead in the rookery of the Red Keep. A sickness took them over night, the servants say at court, that, or a human hand who didn't want King Aegon to know…"

Gendry's innards were boiling when he thanked the two men for sharing so interesting stories and ran to Daenerys's ship, Nymeria on his heels. Old Ser Barristan walked out to meet him and interrupted his account several times. "Lady Ashara Dayne, you say?" he asked, "Are you certain?"

Gendry nodded.

"The queen is not here," Ser Barristan said "she has taken her dragon out to fly this morning, somewhere far away where he can hunt. But I will go back to the city with you to see if they will let me speak with Septa Lemore. When should this sentencing and the execution come to pass?"

"In three days," Gendry said. "Whoever is behind this wants King Aegon to reach Highgarden and to be unable to return, if a raven miraculously reaches him by that time because there are none left in this city. Forgive me for asking this now, but I have also thought of something the Elder Brother had said. Of how familiar things Arya lived through may help her now."

"Yes?"

"Well, she had seen the execution of her father. Maybe seeing this septa's execution will wake her up. Like another unexpected shock."

"Let's hope it won't come to that," Ser Barristan said, dead serious in his demeanour, right hand on the pommel of his sword.

"But if it does..."

"I should ask the queen," the old knight said, softly, "but knowing her, she might allow you to expose the young Lady Stark to that if it could be to her benefit. Queen Daenerys may ask of you to stay with Arya Stark at all times, for she is still the queen's prisoner.

"I would never let Arya go," Gendry said. "I did it once and I won't do it again." He was startled when two grey paws of a direwolf leaned on his back and shoulders, gingerly, letting him keep his balance. A huge nose scraped the back of his neck, grazing it with sharp yellow teeth, oddly careful not to leave a visible mark.

**Ser Barristan**

Barristan Selmy paced in front of a locked chamber in the Red Keep, waiting for Lord Baelish to let him in. The master of coin did not leave him to wait for long. "King Aegon is wise and kind," he said. "He ordered us to keep Septa Lemore here and not in the dungeons."

The door sank in under hands smelling unhealthily of mint, first ajar, then open.

The life blood of the aged knight stopped from running, awaiting to see the only Lady whose hand he would have asked in marriage if he hadn't sworn the vows of the Kingsguard in his youth, the girl his parents had found for him be damned. As always, Ser Barristan dwelt on what would have happened if he unhorsed Prince Rhaegar in the final tilt of the Great Tourney of Lord Whent in Harrenhal, and if he had the courage to crown Lady Ashara Dayne to be his Queen of Love and Beauty, the same crazy courage Rhaegar Targaryen had shown when he chose Lyanna Stark, honouring her uniqueness in all the Seven Kingdoms with the blue roses of winter.

He walked in and he saw _her._ He grasped the truth more amazing than any of his thoughts. Cruel and full of meaning as life itself. His heart was beating stronger than when he saved Daenerys from a manticore, far away over the seas. For a moment he was afraid that the Lord Baelish, who kept standing behind his back, could hear it.

Barristan Selmy was never very good at deceit, but he would not bring himself to betray what he felt to the master of coin. Not about her, among all the women in the world presumed dead, and yet alive. More beautiful even than when they were all young, and full of dreams of knighthood and valour. Now they were much older, but Ser Barristan found consolation knowing that his dreams had remained the same. Serving Daenerys was a good way to stand for what he believed in.

She was standing at the open window, _tall_ in her septa robes, Ser Barristan had noted with admiration. Her head remained bare, betraying her true stature, and her features appeared thinned and pale, as from a great suffering that had nonetheless not harmed her beauty.

"What has been done to her?" Ser Barristan asked in a voice of a Lord Commander of the Queensguard, startling Baelish on his feet.

"Oh, nothing," Baelish said, slightly offended that his good intentions have been questioned. "She's suffering from an ailment that gives her fits of losing awareness. Similar to young Lord Arryn, if you have heard. When it happens, and it has been a lot of late, she is not able to take food. I didn't have heart to order the servants to feed her by force."

 _As if you had a heart at all,_ Ser Barristan thought, while his own was pounding wildly, not as he expected it would before he stepped in the room, but in an acknowledgement of greatness that surpassed his person and the past sorrow of his heart. It was _wonderful_ to see her alive, in the Red Keep, thin or not.

"My lady," he whispered, falling to his knees in awe. "It is you!"

Baelish, behind him, nearly danced from contentment, when his suspicions about Lady Ashara Dayne were confirmed by one of the few persons who would have known her, always. Ser Barristan's infatuation with the sister of the Sword of the Morning was hardly a secret in the old days. Littlefinger, a son of a lesser lord, was not invited to Harrenhal, and it was the only time that Lady Dayne, famous for her charm and grace in all the Seven Kingdoms, came north from the hot sands of her home, as far as Ser Barristan had known.

"Ser Barristan," she acknowledged him, "you do know me then. I surmised as much. It even gladdens my heart that I can still be known where all must have forgotten me."

Her face was lit from within by a sad smile.

"How could I not know you!" he continued, staring at the ground. "I am so sorry, my lady. So very sorry for all your losses, for my own cowardice where I should have been brave, and for everything that had come to pass."

"Brave people die, Ser Barristan," she said with a tiny scorn. "Surely you know that. But even if it were cowardice that had kept you alive, of which you will be a better judge than I, it must have been for a reason. How else could we live? Ridden with the burden of what we should have done differently, how could we possibly stay alive if we didn't hope that there may be a reason for our continued existence, mayhaps a chance to do better. I have cried my eyes out in hot rivers of grief and anger for the things that I have done, until one day I stopped it for it would not avail me. I stood next to Aegon and did my duty. And now he did not only sign, which I could still understand, he laid down the sentence on a decree of my execution in his own hand. So perhaps there was no reason for me to continue existing. Or if there was, now it is over. Now that I dared to hope for so much more."

"More, my lady?" Ser Barristan asked, wishing to know as much as he could about her hopes and dreams, even if she wouldn't reveal them in the present company, he knew.

"Rise, Ser Barristan," she told him bitterly. "Thank you for your visit. Now leave and do your duty, to the very end. As will I."

"My lady," he rose only to bow again, lightly. "My lord," he greeted Baelish and took his leave in a hurry before the mint smelling lord could ask him anything else. Wishing to leave the palace as soon as possible, his two old feet nevertheless took him to the room of the Iron Throne, dependent on the deeply entrenched habit to guard the king. Any king. Deserving or not of that name. To his surprise, there was a familiar boy sitting on Iron Throne, his face covered by a masterfully wrought helm.

"Ser Barristan," the young voice called him. "Have you seen her?"

"I have," he replied, recognising Tommen immediately.

"How is she?"

"As she has always been, brave, beautiful and wild," he said, not afraid of the spies. Those things were common knowledge of Lady Ashara Dayne. "Tell me, my lord…"

"-Not a lord, a bastard, Tom Waters is the name," the boy tossed in.

"Tell me, Tom," Ser Barristan had to ask, "has Aegon truly written and signed this order?"

"His signature looks genuine enough, I wouldn't know about the letters," Tommen said. "But there was once upon a time another boy king who signed parchments to practice writing, without understanding what was on them. The boy king also signed white parchments, later on filled by others. One of such formerly blank scrolls was used to make a boy's mother take a walk of shame, naked, through the city, shorn like a sheep, so that her beautiful golden hair would not protect her from evil gazes and unkind words. The boy cried as a boy he was, not as a king, when he discovered that. No matter what she did, she was, and still is, his mother. I wouldn't wish upon His Grace to return to the capital and find Septa Lemore dead by his hand."

"Be in peace, Tom Waters," the old knight had said. "I thank you for your words. And I bid you attend this execution in the name of King Aegon, as I _will_ attend it in the name of Queen Daenerys. I will see you there three days hence."

**Brienne**

"Lend me your shield!" the Hound shouted at Brienne, not caring if he would wake up Jaime, still asleep in the back of the chamber they had shared. Jaime was breathing peacefully enough. It was a source of relief after a strange exhaustion had come over him, ever since they left the battlements razed to the ground with dragonbreath, and took to setting fires of their own. His head had hurt, his limbs had been losing consistency, and Brienne saw clearly how despite keeping the tiniest amount of composure and nobility, Jaime could barely walk and work until they could finally get some rest. What made her worried most of all, was that contrary to his nature, he had not been talking.

Brienne ended up leading Jaime and Gregor, as if they were both equally mindless and chained, through the darkened streets of Highgarden all the way to the castle. There, a frightened servant carried a torch in front of her, all the way to the spacious room with the balcony on the first floor.

Now, Mance and the Elder Brother were running two steps behind Sandor Clegane, unable to catch up with the man's enormous strides. "He is not himself this morning," Mance explained. "We had to prevent him from cutting down all the silent sisters with his sword, the same ones he would have died defending two nights ago. After a very fat one told him some wench he was looking for did not exist. Some faith you are having here in the south! Women of the faith turn the heads of strong men upside down, and the holy orders take arms and fight against fellow men in the name of their gods! It may truly be much better to pray to the trees. They cannot hold a sword, or a cock. Best give him your shield if that will make him any happier. He has to keep his head even if we are to go forward with our plan. Euron will not wait."

Mance reluctantly approached Gregor, chained safely to the angular thick stone pillar of the balcony balustrade outside the chamber. "This is against everything I believe in," he said. "But I do not see another way. It is abominable."

The Hound surprised them all by reformulating his plea. "May I borrow your shield for today, my lady?" His deep voice sounded like a speech of a highborn knight educated in the manners of the court. It would fool anyone if they didn't look at his face. Ugly as usual, yet also haunted that morning. _Changed,_ Brienne found. By what, and _into what_ , she could not tell.

"If it please you, my lord," she replied mechanically handing him the shield. She gave it to the Elder Brother once, and it was for the best. Lending it one more time could not hurt.

"Worry about your own heads, not mine," Sandor Clegane told Mance and the Elder Brother sounding more like himself. "I know my part in this. Do you, my lady?" he faced Brienne again, grey eyes questioning the integrity of her soul.

"No matter what happens," Brienne repeated the part of the plan concerning her, enduring his stare with a blue one of her own, without a moment of hesitation. "No matter who dies, behind me, or around me," she continued, "I do not stop, I do not fight. I do not defend anyone. I am to take the horn away and I am not to stop until I lay it at the feet of the Queen Daenerys in King's Landing."

"It may not prove easy," the Hound added, grey gaze still piercing her like cold steel.

"Honour doesn't come easily and soldiers are trained to obey," she repeated something she had learned, and she meant it, too. He seemed to have read in her the confirmation he had been looking for.

"There is a good girl, stubborn as a mule, yet resilient as a warhorse," the Hound observed rudely, in a nearly _friendly_ way. Brienne understood something about the mostly cruel man. He would tell her she was ugly and worse, in her face. _A warhorse,_ she thought, _not much better than the aurochs men compared me to when they didn't know I was listening._ But unlike the comely knights who said all that laughing behind her back, the Hound had always treated her like his equal, even if she was a woman to start with.

"I will give you my horse," Sandor Clegane said. "He is not as dangerous as he seems. He is by far the fastest of all the horses I have ever seen or ridden. Euron has no cavalry. You should be away before either ironborn or their wights can stop you. From what we have all seen the dead possess great speed and they are inhumanly strong in a duel face to face. Yet I would bet my life that they cannot outrun Stranger. The rest of us will follow behind you when we can. Stay away from the road and you should be fine."

"He is right," Mance added. "The wights are slower than his horse, at any rate."

"Thank you," Brienne said. "That is uncommonly _kind_ of you."

"Kindness has nothing to do with that," he said. "Best believe that. Wake him up," he pointed at Jaime. "It's time to go."

"He's been like this since yesterday," she explained. "Ever since the white dragon burned the tower. I believe that he may be ill, my lords," she said, to tell them something, terribly uncertain of her powers to do any part of what was demanded of her which concerned Jaime. Brienne was terribly uncertain about the fragile strings of devotion stretching between the two of them, more treacherous than his fingers on her thighs, more maddening than his lips on her own, more beautiful than anything she had ever expected to find in a man of flesh and blood.

"Ser Jaime," she called him more roughly than she intended to, suddenly ashamed to let show her weakness toward the blond men sleeping, in front of the other men, before the only company of men who had accepted her as one of their own. "Jaime!" she pulled his hair, unable to think of anything more gentle to do. "We have to go."

"Gods, wench, I have heard you," Jaime Lannister said. Stirring awake with difficulty he mumbled. "I would come back from the dead if you called me, Brienne."

Brienne nodded, her face purposefully even despite the turmoil in her chest when he called her by her name. She was one more knight among the others, about to ride out to meet their enemy. She grasped the hilt of her sword, picked up the crystal container for the horn, and moved purposefully out of the chamber and the gloomy safety it provided. In the yard of the castle, buzzing with men and horses in the weak light of the morning, she approached the Hound's horse. The man who owned it glided silently behind her, lost in his own thoughts. _My shield fits him,_ she concluded. _A lone tree on a sunset field for a rather singular man._ The animal didn't react to her presence at first; then it neighed and moved its legs violently when she mounted it. Brienne was determined to appear strong, and she remained firmly in saddle. When she dismounted, she dared to caress the head of the horse, as she would do to any other. It was a magnificent animal, badly tempered or not. The warhorse opted to stand more immobile than his master while Brienne attached a special saddle bag with Myrish glass vessel to its broad black-haired back.

"See," the Hound said placidly, "he is not only what he seems."

 _Neither are you,_ Brienne thought, _and neither am I,_ she understood, with newly discovered certainty, checking that the orange blossom was still gracing her unruly straw-like hair. Ridiculously, she thought she could feel its scent, and a small touch upon its petals revealed the flower's persistent refusal to fall to decay, challenging the natural course of events, as if it possessed a life force of its own.

She shivered remembering the evil black shadow Euron Greyjoy's red priest released upon the city, drowning Highgarden in the blackness of the ungodly night. So similar to the shadow of King Stannis which crawled into his brother's tent and killed King Renly. _Lord Euron has to be stopped_ , Brienne told herself to take courage from it, _and the dragons freed from the lure of the horn which is not rightfully his._

Brienne prayed fervently to the Seven, to the Warrior and to the Crone, that she should have the necessary strength of arm and mind to leave with the seven-times-cursed horn.

Even if the one of her companions to die behind her would be Jaime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ends a bit awkwardly, and it's a kind of a filler chapter. The alternative was to leave it at a very evil cliffhanger, half way the confrontation with Euron, or to publish two chapters together with a delay of three weeks. I wasn't happy with either, so here we stay for the time being. Comments are love and constructive criticism most welcome. Thank you to everyone who left the kudos and/or commented.


	38. What is Dead May Never Die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Euron, obviously, has to lose the horn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go again, sooner than I thought. More concerned than usual about how this one will turn out. The mood in this chapter is inspired by the song "And if I have to go" and the arrival of mummers to challenge Euron by a scene from a film Wild Bunch. If you like this old film, you should be able to guess easily which one.
> 
> Warning for violence and gore. Take it seriously.

**Aegon**

King Aegon rode forth from King's Landing determined as a ruler of old, with the flame of justice shining on his brow. He set out south, and south-west, bringing with him the Golden Company, and the Lady Jeyne, in her cloak of glistening black velvet. The lands grew darker and emptier where they passed. Green fields turned into yellow, and ash. They have approached Highgarden by the willowy meadows and the orchards, taking shelter between the high ridges and the lower slopes. The land was curved, the decaying grass still soft, as a body of a woman. They had been avoiding the roseroad, not knowing what they would find around the city. Or if there would be a city at all, other than scorched land, and smouldering ruin.

None of the scouts they had sent forth have returned. Already very near the city of roses, they could hear clearly a great commotion emerging from one of the largest, still lusciously green hills, a promontory of high ground towering above the river Mander, facing the once inviting capital of the Reach. Clouds of dark smoke were rising from Highgarden, climbing bluntly toward the sky. A forest thrived on the hill, from the low wide bottom to the spacious bold top, except for a tiny paved road winding upwards from the direction of the city. The lords of Highgarden would use it to enjoy the beauty of their domain with their noble guests, and in better days dancing and music from the hill could be heard from afar. Now, a black sail loomed from its top. And high in the dense gloomy air above it, Aegon thought he could glimpse the sight of green scales of a large dragon. _The dragons gone wild and astray,_ he considered, with unease.

Aegon ordered his army to dismount. Horses were left tied at the bottom of the slope, with a few guards that could be spared. The Golden Company crept forward amongst the slender birches, replaced by elms or oaks when they moved higher up. The arms of the red three-headed dragon of the House Targaryen and the black one of its bastards, the Blackfyres, journeyed mixed on their shields, reconciled, if not in history, at least as the decoration on the weaponry. Aegon never sanctioned the preferences of his hosts. _A dragon is a dragon either way_ , he often thought, unsure whether he was one or not.

He knew, for certain, where all other reason failed, that he did admire dragons. Savage or tame alike.

The army advanced slowly towards the source of the clamour under the darkened sky, determined to surprise their enemy. Jeyne and Aegon led the way, inseparable, giving example in stealth. Near the top they saw the black ship in its entirety, through the thick greenery that sheltered them. She was raised high above the ground on the shoulders of the dead, surrounded by the army of the wights, just like the ravens that had reached the capital announced. The prow of the ship was abandoned, the black sail folded with care on its mast. Only a large horn stood on its pedestal of iron, mounted on the deck, a fair warning for all to see.

 _The horn of the dragonlords,_ Aegon thought, respect mixed with fear, not seeing himself as a dragonlord at all. But the weight of the famous greatsword of Ser Arthur Dayne on his back was familiar, and he trusted in his right arm to cut down Euron Greyjoy as weed if chance allowed it.

The ranks of slaves flanked the lonely paved road, winding down and away from the ship. They wore collars like the slaves in Essos, and carried wooden baskets with blue flower petals such as Aegon had never seen. Behind them, the numerous companies of the dead guarded the only way up to the black vessel. The Golden Company, fortunately, was not using a cut path, and no one seemed to have noticed them slipping behind the ironborn back.

 _There are too many,_ Aegon's purple eyes soon revealed, _I cannot prevail, not with strength alone, nor with cunning, for if they see us first, we are done._ "My lady," he told Jeyne, "we shall wait, for the time being."

Afraid to order his army forward, yet too young and too brave to command a retreat, Aegon waited. Jeyne was always with him, a black figure more mute than the ship bearing the name of Silence. A rough voice burst into a song, unstoppable, resounding from below, from far down the path to approach the hill from the city, watched by the slaves and the dead. Aegon half expected to hear the mystery bard from King's Landing. Yet the instrument playing was not a refined high harp, but a sorrowful warm sounding lute, containing the immense sadness of the earth in the relentless tremor of its fewer strings. The singer's voice was less noble too, but equally convincing.

The man sang quietly, a melody woven of both hope and despair.

_Near the red mountains of Dorne,_

_In the far south,_

_There stood a fort,_

_An outpost from the past_

_A remnant of the old days_

_To watch over Stormlands._

_Home it became to two_

_Who have fled from wrong,_

_Rhaegar treasured its walls_

_He called it the Tower of Joy._

_xxxxxxxxx_

_Lyanna was with child,_

_When Rhaegar took his farewell._

_Favours they have exchanged,_

_Great gifts of far sight,_

_Blessed by the magic of light._

_For light is strong in Dorne_

_Just like its sands are hot._

_None now know what they were,_

_The tokens to keep them together_

_when they would be apart:_

_it is said they were a treasure,_

_a knowledge that the other was alive._

_xxxxxx_

_In the Tower of Joy they stood_

_Quiet among the stones._

_And Rhaegar held Lyanna close._

" _My heart has had too much," he said._

" _My lips have drowned in yours._

_My arms have touched the sky._

_I have drunk too deeply from your love,_

_I have had so much happiness,_

_It has to be enough."_

_xxxxxxx_

" _If I should not return,_

_Tell our child how I was,_

_Do not waste time ever to speak_

_of the Prince of Dragonstone!_

_Tell him about his father,_

_the man besieged with doubts._

_The man who betrayed his blood_

_To protect what he had loved._

_xxxxxxx_

_In the Tower of Joy they stood_

_Quiet among the stones._

" _My lord," Lyanna whispered,_

_drowning in her tears._

" _Rhaegar! Beloved!_

_There is never enough love._

_Return to me when you can!_

_Return to speak to your child!_

_For if I die in childbed_

_Who else will tell him about me?_

_Who will sing him about me?_

_Who will put him to sleep?_

_If a wilful mother who_

_gave him his life_

_will not be there for him?"_

_xxxxxxx_

" _I am the Last Dragon," he said._

" _My father, my brother,_

_they bear no fire in blood,_

_The dragons have all died._

_Not so all the wolves!_

_They might accept your child,_

_Take it as their own._

_If I should not return,_

_Lie that I have forced you_

_Lie that I have raped you._

_Live and stay strong."_

_xxxxxxx_

" _War is a great sorrow," she said,_

" _yet you might prevail._

_Don't think of my lips,_

_Think of your lance,_

_And come to me again._

_And if you should not return_

_and the gods keep me alive,_

_I will thank them and bless them_

_and live to remember you_

_for all days of my life."_

_My father was going to have a child with Lyanna Stark,_ Aegon thought and unconsciously grabbed Jeyne's hand. He had never done it before, and not for the lack of desiring it. It was very cold, nothing like he would have wanted it: he had dreamed of it as warm and reassuring, but not in a motherly fashion. It was not getting any warmer while he held it. He approached his face to hers under the cowl and where her hair had touched his cheek, it was silky and alive, unlike her cold fingers, although it smelled of withered flowers. He never let her hand go, until she snatched it and stole it away, an icicle buried back among the endless humming of the smooth black velvet.

The Golden Company observed the Silence in the silence of the trees, waiting for an order of their king.

Aegon saw them then, the singing party, shortly after the song had ended. Three rode in front, in one single line: a giant woman on a black stallion that could have been born directly from the flames of Valyria; a handsome and proud but tired, almost sick-looking man, golden-haired, on a horse white as snow, holding the reins in his left hand, for his right one was missing; and finally there came the haunted monk, the champion of the Faith from King's Landing, head wrapped in red, like a bandage soaked with dark-coloured blood, dark eyes ablaze in the light of the torch he was carrying.

Behind them walked steadily the Lady Sansa's guard, the ugliest man Aegon had ever seen before, with a confidence of one knowing very well what he was doing. The greatsword on his back seemed as heavy and powerful as Aegon's own, although it was made of ordinary Westerosi, and not of Valyrian steel. In his left hand, he carried a rounded wooden shield, turned downwards so that the painting on it could not be seen. He would also be the tallest man Aegon had ever seen if he had not been holding in his right hand a chain on which walked an eight foot tall one, a creature whose head didn't fit correctly on its body, and whose eyes didn't look alive.

After them came a highborn lord from the House Tyrell, the sigil of the golden rose high upon his chest, one foot missing in the stirrups of his horse. _One of Lord Mace's sons,_ Aegon understood. _So the city has not been conquered,_ he rejoiced. _Unless they have come to surrender now..._ Side by side with the lord rode the northern singer Daenerys had sent on an errand to fetch the horn, in his bastard cloak cruel stories were being told about. _The wildlings cook their captives for dinner, and he wears the coat of human skin,_ commoners rumoured in the capital, yet all spoke highly of his bard skills, and bets were made on the place in the city where his show would be played. Aegon could not tell if any of the gossip was true. The upbringing he received on wildlings was rather scarce and he intended to remedy that if he could. The sooner, the better.

The wildling was the man singing. He was still gently caressing the strings of his lute, as though the instrument were his mistress, and not a mere work of an artisan, crafted of taut metal and properly shaped wood. A hundred of so horsemen followed in the wake of the vanguard, most of them with torches too. A hundred mounted men, _and women,_ Aegon noticed, against a multitude of wights, their steeds whinnying in the wind, shrieking from the sides of the road and the sea of corpses behind them.

Profoundly disturbed, Aegon recognised a Tyroshi face of one of his scouts in the first ranks of the dead. Euron clearly believed he was invincible. _That is why he didn't even send out scouts of his own, dead or alive_ , the young king comprehended, adding his numbers to the mounted knights. _So much the better,_ he thought, _Lord Greyjoy has_ _thus no knowledge that the Golden Company, sufficiently manned or not, sits quietly among the trees behind his ship._

The discovery made him smile wickedly, waiting for an opportune moment to grasp his chance for victory.

**Sandor**

If Sandor Clegane knew what Mance Rayder was going to sing about as they headed towards the place where Euron had shifted his headquarters on a whim, he would have given in to the Northman's demand to read the farewell scene between Rhaegar and Lyanna with Lady Brienne in the last moments before departing. Since Sansa was not there, at least as far as Mance knew.

Several hours after waking up, only one thing was clearer than mountain water in the dog's mind. He didn't know, he had no proof still. But his heart which had not held a belief in the long years since his innocence burned, now harboured a single one.

Sansa came to his bed.

And that meant she was still there, somewhere. She could shy from him if she so wanted, but she could not fly away like no other inhabitant of the accursed city.

When he took Brienne's shield, needed to better fool Euron, or so he told himself, his faith was hard as a rock, and what he wanted was impossible, so he dismissed it as he would an inopportune squire.

He still wanted to do a deed they had foreseen, to save the city. For such a thing, no one could count on Gregor, mindless or not, and the others were simply too stupid if they believed that they could. And now, now he had to save Sansa, too, who had to be _there_. Before the bloody song he still kept calm, thanking Lord Tywin's ungentle training in matters pertaining to winning over one's enemies at all cost. But the verses catapulted his thoughts to a vaulted hall in a high tower that never existed, where he would be taking his own farewell from Sansa. She would cry and beg him to return, holding his ruined face in her hands in the bright light of the day.

 _I have indeed drunk too much of your sweetness,_ he thought, _and it is time to end it now._

Except that he couldn't, not willingly. He still wanted to do the deed, but ever since Mance's song ended he burned with desire to stay alive and learn beyond a shadow of a doubt if he had received the biggest blessing of his useless years in life, or in a dream.

They arrived in front of the ship, empty and black. Sandor took a good look at the horn; it was less imposing than the day before. Everything had been different than the day before. The gloom of the morning seemed less. The rose bushes defending the city were a welcome sight, and not a buggering nuisance. An image emerged in his mind, one that he was so ashamed of, as he gazed _languidly_ over the fields of flowers, that he buried it even deeper in his soul than he had buried his love for Sansa. _A maiden cloak of blue roses, bluer than the shade of blue of her eyes._

The dog shook his head violently and sprang back to life. "Sing it again, Mance!" he barked an order. "Louder! His lordship didn't hear us."

The lute returned to the Tower of Joy, lamenting the passing of the Last Dragon. The Elder Brother's face twisted in pain from old wounds, Jaime looked as if he was about to fall from his horse, and Brienne was tense as a bow, waiting for her part to begin. The noise, or some other thing, finally caused the Lord of the Krakens to make his solemn appearance, followed by his priest and at least two dozens living ironborn who must have been breaking their fast with their lordship in the belly of the ship.

"How inconsiderate and how inappropriately challenging rhyme from the mouth of my future slaves," Euron said wryly, as the dragon wings flapped from above, invisible above the grey cloud covering the sky. "I shall tell of your discourtesy to my dragons and they will be kind to reward you in their own fashion."

"They are not your dragons," Sandor Clegane said, unable to keep quiet about the truth any longer. "Why else would a harmless song about the Last Dragon bother you? You are no dragonlord! You stole the dragons by the magic of the horn. And even so, they do not seem to obey your every wish and command."

"Who are you to presume that much?" Euron asked and immediately smi **l** ed with genuine contempt. "Oh, the courageous city of fruit and flowers could not find a man brave enough to face me so they have sent me a maimed Lannister dog. A lowborn and a brute. Maybe I should ask your liege lord, the Kingslayer, to step forth, he at least is a son of a lord. And he may prove a fancy treat for my dragons before this day is over."

Jaime could not answer, fighting to stay in the saddle. And insults were not enough to break the lucidity of the Hound's mind. He was used to them. "This dog cut open the throats of many brave ironborn men when we scaled the walls of Pyke during your brother's rebellion," he said. "Including one of your brother's sons and heirs. A bigger brute than I, and a worse soldier at that, called Maron. That would be your brother Balon's rebellion I speak of. In case you forgot all about him, that was your lordly brother who banished you from Westeros, and who later on broke his neck in his own castle if the ravens did not lie. Saved you the trouble to murder him now, to steal his lordship like you stole the dragons. Bugger me, you probably stole the horn. Is there a thing you can call your own, Euron Greyjoy?"

"Soon I will call the most beautiful woman in the world my own," Euron said dreamily, almost as if he believed it, the Hound noticed with curiosity, wondering at the meaning of his words.

"You will not," Sandor Clegane said, by instinct.

"No?" Euron asked in amusement. Behind him, the red priest started a fire on a large metal tripod on the deck, gazing devotedly at the dwarf tongues of flame dancing towards the sky, gaining in size. He murmured incantations in a foreign language, a speech no one understood.

"No," Sandor Clegane shook his head and looked around, never more convinced of anything in his dog life.

He looked far enough and he saw her. He would recognise her in any disguise she wore even where no one else would. She wore a slave collar, but it was less thick and slightly different in colour than that of the other slaves. _A lie,_ that. The auburn of her hair was hidden under a grey scarf, the fabric suspiciously resembling the one that used to cloth a silent sister. She stood next to a slender, shorter slave woman, whose face was completely covered with a plain black cowl, and the pair of children he had seen before. She was looking at her feet, not at him, not at anyone, but she was _there. No one can look down better than Sansa Stark,_ he thought, and for the first time, he didn't mind. Not truly.

"No," Sandor Clegane repeated, grinning in contagious joy, overwhelmed by the crazy idea of embarking on the greatest mummer's farce in his life.

He ventured on the stairs leading to the ship, closer to Euron, and to the horn, bringing Gregor up, too.

"You will not," he repeated when they were on the deck, eye to eye with Greyjoy. "For the most beautiful of women has been mine, and no other is worthy to hold the hem of her skirts."

He couldn't turn around to search her figure for reaction because Euron rushed towards him. On the kraken's back, there was a greatsword too, sheathed in the scabbard of precious dark brown wood, from the Iron Islands, from Asshai, or from the ruins of the Old Valyria like the Horn. From it Euron drew a sword of bright steel, faster than any man Sandor Clegane had ever faced. Stronger than Gregor at his best. The House Greyjoy never possessed such a blade, rippling in cold grey and blue of winter, mingled with the darker green of the untamed forests of the north. A sword such as it had never been seen that far down in the lands of the south.

"Ice!" Mance Rayder let out a torrent of words, unwillingly. "The ancestral sword of the House Stark! I have seen old Lord Rickard wearing it, and later on Eddard, his heir. I would recognise that sword anywhere just like I would recognise the Longclaw of the Mormonts, now worn by the Lord Commander on the Wall."

The Hound had no time to listen to the erudite explanation of the King-beyond-the-Wall. The blade of Valyrian steel would have cut his throat if he wasn't fast enough to unsheathe the ordinary one of his own and block part of the onslaught with the wooden shield. _A weapon is only as deadly as a man wielding it,_ he knew.

Gregor's chain dropped to the ground. Sandor Clegane hoped Ser Bonifer and Gregor were not about to ruin everything by simply walking away before time, while he was fighting the Lord of the Krakens on his black ship, stranded on dry land. _Brotherkiller,_ he thought with anger. _Men are not supposed to hurt their brothers like that._ It gave him new force and he was going to need it. Despite being a more skilful swordsman than Euron, the kraken had the strength and the speed men did not possess… _yet Mance claimed he was not a walker_ , the Hound thought, defending and landing blows as he could. The green and light blue sparkles sprang to life from his opponent's blade of superior beauty. _This sword belonged to Sansa's father,_ the Hound remembered. _But Joffrey gave it to Ilyn Payne, who became a wight and died._ A strike of Ice, nearly swept away his ugly head, too busy thinking, just before Sandor Clegane succeeded in landing the first threatening blow on his enemy, somewhere between hip and waist. The kraken was not armoured so there should have been blood, but there was none.

 _A wight,_ Sandor Clegane discovered. _He is also a wight, might be an enchanted one, a more powerful or a more handsome one, but he is as dead as the army he is leading._ The Hound jumped aside towards the figure of the lean black maiden stretching into emptiness from the prow. He circled his opponent to conquer a moment to think. From a corner of the eye he could check that Gregor was still there. _Small mercies,_ he thought parrying another blow aimed at his shoulders, than at his bad leg. _He is a wight posing like a living man in front of his precious krakens…I have to cut him into pieces, or burn him, to win this, and it will still not give me the horn…_ Forty men at least surrounded the pedestal, probably more, most living men and a few chosen wights of noble birth. Too many axes, daggers and swords, without counting the deadly consequences of holding the horn. To have any chance of success, he needed Euron to allow him to carry it away. Like Loras and Victarion had attempted to do.

The Hound used all his strength to retreat several steps backwards and gain a few feet of empty space from the kraken. He stood near Gregor again, and proclaimed as hard as he could for everyone to hear, putting a strain on his burned voice to resound over the green hills above the river Mander. "It takes more than bragging to possess a woman, it takes a warm body to match hers, and not a frozen cock! I know the price you paid to bend the horn to your will! It was not the iron price you were willing to pay! You paid it with the blood of your lif-"

"Enough!" Euron shouted before the Hound would finish speaking, raising his left arm high up in the air, as if that could shut up the dog. He also stopped fighting so Sandor Clegane decided to regain breath and be silent of his own. For a while, at any rate. For he was not yet done _talking._ Farting fickle wind through his useless ruined mouth. "Where is the presumed rightful dragonlord or lady?" Euron screamed, demented. "You owe it to me! Or you have seen what my dragons can do."

Obeying, invisible above, the wiry wings were beating like mad. A wisp of smoke penetrated into the air above the ship through the dark cloud. The red priest murmured something to his flames when Mance at last spoke his part in Sandor's plan as he had shared it with his companions.

"Sandor Clegane was holding the man you want on a chain. He is too dangerous to be left to walk alone. Won't you let him take the horn to measure the value of his claim?"

"That? Hm…" Euron said eyeing Gregor, torn with doubts, glancing at his priest for advice, receiving none. "He seems powerful enough but he is not what I expected from a dragonlord. I expected someone more…"

"Noble?" the Hound asked.

"Who could there be more noble than Ser Gregor Clegane, the flower of chivalry, knighted by Prince Rhaegar, the Last Dragon himself?" the Elder Brother asked diligently, face glowing oddly in the light of the torch.

"If you don't allow it, you will not know," Mance said calmly.

"Good," Euron accepted. "But beware if this is some kind of trick! There will be no mercy for any of you under the sun."

 _There is no sun,_ the Hound thought.

A mixed company of ironborn and wights, Ser Loras included, left open a passage to the horn. Sandor took Gregor slowly towards the metal dais, never sheathing his sword, shield abandoned on the deck where he and Euron fought. He was so compelled by the precision of the task that he didn't even look back to see if Sansa was still watching. _Now to the best part,_ he thought, stomach twisting in malicious joy. _Where I lose my life, and you lose your dragons._

It was at that moment, when all was going well, that the buggering Jaime Lannister had to regain the gift of speech and master his illness. He started screaming in a sick sounding voice, nearly ruining it all. "Mance! Stop it!" The Hound cursed inwardly. His true intentions were known by the bloody Kingslayer, smarter than the honourable lady, the holy brother or the cursed Northman.

Fortunately for his plan, and not so much for Jaime, as soon as he pronounced those words, it was as if Euron had another horn or a different way to force a dragon to do his bidding. The tangle of white wings descended abruptly through the cloud above, picking up Jaime like prey, with a dexterous, many-nailed claw. It pulled him up and on its scaled body. Jaime scrambled further up the dragon's pearly scales, until he was seated on it, hugging the beast's neck not to fall.

"Stop it!" Jaime continued screaming, his voice fortunately less and less audible as he fought first to reach, and than to stay on the dragon's back while the beast soared up in the sky with his charge. "Gregor is a ruse! He means to do it!" The final accusation was completely swallowed by the whistling of the wind. The last golden Lannister curls disappeared in the air above the unnatural black cloud, moments before the white and golden glowing underside of the animal's wings vanished too.

The Hound had a moment to admire Lady Brienne's countenance. She followed Jaime's ascent to the heavens, not moving a muscle on her broad face. She was almost as good at being alof as he was when Joffrey had Sansa beaten and stripped in court. The Elder Brother crossed his arms over his chest, observed and waited for more.

The Hound had to proceed with his own part of the plan before Mance would possibly understand and act upon Jaime's words. When Gregor was only a step away from the horn, and Sandor one step behind him, the Hound raised his sword high, more violently than ever before. In one swing, he separated Ser Bonifer's head from Gregor's body. Black blood oozed from the wound, dirtying Sandor's body, drops splattering over his hands and face. "Look, Gregor," he told his headless brother, imitating the voice of Ser Kevan Lannister, motioning all those nearby the horn. "Lord Tywin said we should kill them all. You can even rape them if it pleases you to rape men, he said. They took what was his and they should pay. Do your duty, dog."

Headless Gregor gurgled and launched himself against the large company of men and wights. He was delayed in his advance by their superior number, yet he was slowly winning ground. As Sansa once said, _no one could withstand him._ The Hound threw his head backwards and laughed, wholeheartedly. It was the only thing to do when in the end of their lives, Gregor was of some use too, albeit limited.

For if Gregor won against the odds, he would proceed to kill anyone else he could get hold off. That was the risk of Sandor's real plan.

"Sandor Clegane is a true dragon friend!" the Elder Brother proclaimed with infallible finality, turning way more helpful and understanding than Jaime, improvising his new part in the mummery they never discussed or rehearsed. "He is carrying the sigil of Ser Duncan the Tall, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard of King Aegon V Targaryen, on his shield!" By the false plan Sandor had presented, the monk was supposed to point out that the shield was Gregor's, if Euron would not believe them.

"It is true," the Hound lied evenly to a confused Euron further, while Gregor cut and sliced on the deck. "Behold, Lord Greyjoy." he said, raising Brienne's shield from where he dropped it earlier. "I am a dragon friend."

And then he added a fabrication of his own, which he had never told anyone else before. "I am an heir of Ser Duncan the Tall. My great-great-grandmother on my father's side was called Tanselle Too-Tall, a puppeteer from Dorne whom Ser Duncan loved in secret, if not in the songs. She had given him a son without him knowing of it, at the time when he departed to follow King Aegon to Summerhall where they both died." It was a very far fetched story Sandor Clegane invented after Euron killed Victarion. Made of his sunken childhood dreams of knighthood, his height, the real name of his great-great-grandmother, and a frail tapestry hanging in the Clegane Keep. _One more lie could fit in just as well_ , the Hound thought on a whim, saying: "And my face, my face was made by dragonbreath many years ago..."

To his enormous and still growing surprise, both Euron Greyjoy and the Elder Brother stared at him as if they had actually believed every single piece of horseshit that had just come out of his too big mouth.

It was time for the Hound to snatch the horn while the good luck lasted, and Gregor was busy killing the enemy. Sandor Clegane stepped on the iron pedestal and looked for Brienne, who was as near the stairs leading up to the ship as a horse could be forced to come in the direction of the wights carrying it. Euron didn't stop him. The Hound counted he would have to make some twenty steps with the accursed object before his strength could fail him, and Stranger could take over his burden. Brienne only had to spur the horse and in ten strides she would be in the woods, dense and dark green, where the horseless wights would hardly be able to overtake her even if she was as unwilling a rider as Sansa, which she was most certainly not. And carrying a ship forward on the firm ground did not go very fast either, as Sandor Clegane confirmed by the pace of the vessel when Greyjoy first arrived.

Euron understood his intentions, and a greedy dead hand stretched with yearning in Sandor's direction. _The craven wants to suck in my strength like he did with his brother,_ Sandor understood with disgust. _But he will not have it for I will not blow the horn. I will only die burning from its touch. What more can anyone ask of me?_

"Don't hold it, please" Euron admonished sweetly. "A _burned_ man like you knows better than most how harsh it is going to be. It will hurt less if you only blow..."

"How considerate of you, cold-blooded kraken," the Hound barked, dropping the shield again, "to worry about my pain."

He sheathed his sword as his most treasured possession over his broad back and took the horn in both hands. It was heavier than he thought, yet the weight was not unbearable. In a moment, the expected sensation of burning started. His hands were about to melt like tallow, just like his face once did, but he could not dwell on it, or take them away. He had to walk.

"Blow it!" Euron urged him. "Blow it and it will soon be over!"

The offer was tempting. Yet the Hound gritted his teeth and walked further, fighting the impulse to sob and run away. He would have preferred to die from a sword. _Give me a clean death!_ he wished, moving steadily in the direction of the messy one that awaited him. The pain grew out of all proportions, until it seemed as if his entire body was set on fire, even if only his hands were becoming a tangle of torn skin, watered by red blood running out. The stench of roasted flesh filled the air. _His,_ he knew, he had smelled it before. He stubbornly looked in front. He was almost out of the ship, descending the stairs. It was further than anyone else had gotten with the buggering thing on their two feet, as far as he had seen. Only five steps away from where the Stranger waited, Myrish glass visible in a saddle bag. Even if he miraculously lived, Sandor Clegane's hands would never be able to hold a sword again. _Or a woman._

"My lips have drowned in yours, little bird," his lips uttered a verse to dull the pain, unable to remember where it had come from, or that it belonged to the bloody mummery. "It'll have to be enough..."

"Blow it!" an inarticulate alluring proposal reached his ears, and the temptation to give in to it was large. To let it all go and be done with. But then he would feed his strength to the tentacles of the kraken and he wasn't quite ready to accept that. _The Hound never did what others expected him to do_ , he remembered, but the conviction lacked its usual force. His grey eyes were losing focus when they suddenly found the singer, immobile on his fat brown horse, his eyes knowledgeable and regretful. "Just burn my body when this is over," he managed to say. "As you want it done for yourself."

In two more steps he would have reached Stranger. The Hound's knees lost solidity and he fell, or rather sat on the last stair, unable to walk further from searing pain. Yet he still held the horn in both hands, turned into a living landscape of wounds, and he hadn't touched it with any other part of his body. He would have to admit defeat. He was no longer able to get up, and Brienne had come as close as she could, she even urged Stranger two little steps further until his nose nearly hit the black wooden body of the ship.

"Blow it," Euron suggested tenderly, his voice a seductive deception. "I will have you burned, I will not keep you in my army, I promise, if that is what you want."

"You... lie..." the Hound stuttered and closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids the sea of flames came to claim him just like it always did in his dreams. But behind the fire there was life, if only he could find a way across the fiery abyss, dug between his hurting body and the other side, where someone else's woman waited on his horse. He didn't see how Euron signalled the red priest, or how the red priest touched the red jewel gleaming on his chest.

When he reopened his eyes, Euron too was holding the horn, trying to force it into Sandor's mouth. His hands remained dead and unblemished, unaffected by the magic of the majestic instrument they were now both fighting to possess. Sandor made one more step forward on his knees, dragging both Euron and the horn with him. If he could make one more step, the horn would be in the saddlebag and everything would be over

On the side, two more bodies jumped down from the deck. Gregor was trying to hack Ser Loras in pieces, unsuccessfully, just like on the Hand's tourney. Ser Loras still kept his burns, _even as a wight_ , Sandor saw, but now his strength matched Gregor's. _Burns,_ Sandor thought, knowing it was somehow important, fighting to crawl one more step forward, as unsuccessful in it as his brother was in killing Loras. Brienne managed to take Stranger another inch forward, persistent and thorough as a master smith. Euron was forcing the horn mercilessly towards Sandor's mouth, not paying any attention to Brienne. That was a part of the strategy of having a woman in that role. Most man would be misled, never to expect a woman, no matter how strong, to be the main accomplice in what they were trying to do.

 _It burns,_ was the only thing on the Hound's mind when the pain reached the point where his brain snapped open like a pumpkin smashed by the hooves of warhorses in a field. Allowing in his consciousness the words he despised so much that he had almost forgotten them.

Sandor Clegane wrenched the horn from Euron's hands and nearly hit Brienne and Stranger with it. With the last ounce of both strength and stubbornness of mind, he stood up and launched, at Greyjoy, the words of the ghost of the High Heart, understanding what they meant for him, at last.

"What is dead may never die..." he said.

Sandor Clegane felt a terrible remorse about Ser Loras who could have done the same if he only knew. If he had been told. With utmost attention that he could muster when lifting the horn with his mangled arms, he pressed only the burned corner of his mouth to the mouthpiece of the horn, and leaned the top part of the horn to the ruined part of his face for better support. His hands burned still, but he felt nothing on his face. Just like it should be. He hadn't felt anything on that side of his head for years.

He blew the horn and its deep sound was carried loud and clear over the valleys and the hills. He blew the horn and with the forward movement, almost falling, he tucked it in the vessel of Myrish glass in the saddle bag of his horse.

But the alchemists' glass did not live to its promise; it could not support the pressure, bursting in a million tiny pieces in front of pained grey eyes. The Hound stared in shock and Brienne's mouth fell open. _It was all for nothing,_ he thought.

Then, as a torrent of feathery rain from the skies above, both dragons came, faster than anything Sandor had ever seen. The white one opened his mouth while flying, and blew rapidly at the horn before it could hurt Stranger. A new wrapping shaped itself faster than the tempest forming on the night sky. It coiled around the deadly burden in the saddle bag, irregularly-shaped, sharp-edged like the Iron Throne. Numberless small surfaces of crystal, slanting and running into each other, white and lucid as the brilliant scales on the belly of the dragon. _Dragonglass,_ Sandor thought, distracted, _not black, not black…_

Brienne glared at the white dragon and tossed a worried look to the unconscious golden haired man hauled on its back for only a second, before she spurred Stranger and rode off like crazy into the wood. Stranger's rabid hooves did short work of running down a wight or two that dared to stand in her way.

"Viserion," someone called out to the dragons from the onlooking sighing crowd of wights and slaves, humming constantly as the murmuring sea at the events unfolding. "Rhaegal" the same voice timidly said, afraid to be heard and recognised.

The pain in his hands was unbearable, but at least it stopped from growing. Sandor looked at the large white animal hovering right above him, the green one somewhat higher in the air. Euron fought to stay calm and not to betray his nervousness. He motioned nervously to the green dragon as his priest pressed the red jewel even more nervously.

But the green dragon descended softly to hover above the Hound, and spurted several puffs of warm air over his maimed hands. Slowly, the wounds hurt less. The Hound could only stare at his hands and into the green eyes of the beast who seemed to await his command. Euron gestured to the dragons again, but they only had eyes for the man who blew the horn, and yet lived. Since Euron seemed stupid enough to hesitate in killing the man who succeeded in stealing the horn away from him, the Hound did not waste time, and he addressed the dragons.

"Don't look at me," he rasped at them. "Go free, go wild, go to your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters, for all I care. Don't listen to the folly of men... Fly to the mountains and build nests, do whatever it is that you dragons do. No wild animal should be kept caged. Just like no man should be kept a slave or a helpless servant of another..."

The giant lizards obeyed and took flight, not up and through the black cloud any longer, but far into the green and grey distance, safely away from Euron and his festering army.

There was nothing left between Sandor Clegane and the sword he would die from, Ice. It was better than burning to death. He wished he could stand, but being on his knees would have to do. He had no more forces left to get up. He looked at Euron, evenly, than at his hands. The greatsword was still at his back but he could not unsheathe it and much less hold it despite that the dragon had relieved him of the worst of his suffering. Sandor Clegane noticed that the Elder Brother was gone. He was the first one to ride after Brienne as they agreed, to secure the escape of the horn. It was what Sandor wanted, yet he suddenly bore him ill will for leaving him. For not saving his life again and healing him as he did before. So that he could go back to Sansa and return her favour.

"Dragonbreath will not help you now, _dragon friend_ ," Euron said mockingly, stressing every word, raising Ice high above his once handsome and now wightish one-eyed head.

A lament of a woman could be heard from the pressed ranks of the slaves. "So passes my happiness," she whispered, desperate, and the Hound would always recognise her voice. His eyes found Sansa's, a far better thing to look at than Euron, and his soul swell with pride. She didn't cry, or faint, or flinch, or look down any more. The daughter of Lord Eddard Stark learned how to watch a man die.

"I would have lived for you," he said, "if I could."

"Fool," Euron said, in erroneous belief that his prisoner was begging for mercy. "It's too late now. You could have commanded the dragons to destroy both me and my army, and you set them free instead."

The Hound secretly agreed he must have been a fool indeed because he hadn't even thought of doing such a thing. _Better die a fool, than a monster,_ he thought, eyes resting on Sansa.

Ice buzzed in the breeze, when a breath of black, the drops of black, black flakes, black jewels, arrows of black smoke poured down from the sky, falling to the ground mixed with the tongues of black fire. Ice remained hanging in mid-air. Then it fell to the ground like a simple metal spoon, not a mighty blade, at Sandor Clegane's feet. Euron tried to bend to pick it up again when a black dragon, larger and more powerful than his white and green brothers who fled, descended swiftly from the sky, landing on an empty patch of green grass behind the kraken. The animal was darker than the clouds and the shadow conjured by Euron's priest, and the mood it radiated was darker still. Angry would not describe it. The beast was furious. Euron remained standing and his breeches remained dry, but he didn't make a new move to the sword. _The wights do not fear,_ Sandor Clegane thought. Until he realized that he could not move. Both he and Euron were immobilized by the oppressive black will of the dragon. The dragon set out to breathe upon Sandor. In vain, he instinctively tried to raise his wounded hands to protect his already ruined face. _Not my eyes,_ he thought absurdly, _I want to see her again._ He could not see Sansa from the dragon any longer, and now that it was all over, the dragons free, and the horn gone, he yearned to live with all his heart. _Time to pay for the lies I told about descending from Ser Duncan the Tall and all the rest,_ he guessed.

The dragon fixated the dog with a knowledgeable, malleable, viciously bright black eye, searching, almost an eye of an older brother. A more dangerous creature that the dog ever was, but not in the sense Gregor had been. _What do you want from me?_ Sandor thought, puzzled, not aware of his own body sliding down to the grass, until all the world turned blessedly black, like the sharp scales of the black dragon.

**Mance**

As soon as the two dragons left, and Sandor Clegane was brought to his knees, in front of the selfish man who thought to be his better, Mance dismounted and started towards Euron Greyjoy, bare steel in his arms. His horse wouldn't come any closer to the wights without the protection of fire. It was probably not the best idea, but he couldn't just leave his Rhaegar to his destiny after what he had done. Mance was spared this far, maybe he could incapacitate Euron and both he and the Hound would live to escape to the woods. Patience would come to him then, if he called. It was a fragile hope, but it was one.

His good intentions were onset by Gregor and Ser Loras, fighting, obstructing the way. He was forced to parry blows. Mance was sweating to break through on time as he rarely did, but the sword of the House Stark was already swinging in the air, when beyond any expectation, a black dread descended and halted them all. Mance witnessed mutely how Sandor Clegane collapsed to the ground, closing his eyes, supposing it was a wonder in itself the man had endured as much as he did, wondering if he still lived. _He might,_ Mance thought, _he just might._ Then his attention was caught by the relentless wrath of the black dragon, whose black eyes glared as if he was going to swallow Euron alive.

The black beast swept away the lord of the krakens with its paw like an annoying worm who was in its way. The one-eyed squid landed back on the deck of Silence, right under the fuming tripod of his red priest. The black dragon breathed at the Hound's wounded hands, as the white one did before. But the black beast was more powerful, and all could see how the puckered skin slowly closed, healing. It became smoother and regrew, as if Sandor Clegane had never touched the horn.

Euron, not hurt by the flight he took, to Mance's amazement, was restored to his senses and ordered his army forward. The kraken commanded his men to slaughter the dragon, to slice the man who stole his horn into pieces, and to turn him into a wight. The wights obeyed and advanced from all sides, from the ship and the sides of the road. Mance expected the dragon to fly away, or to take the Hound with him, as the white one took Jaime Lannister, at Euron's bidding or not. But the black dragon only waved his giant tail and then he breathed again, calmer than still water. Shiny black crystals circled the tall man curled up on the ground, like a whirlwind of snow could have done in the north. Until an exuberant cage of glimmering luminous black glass rose all around him, trapping his body, still visible within, and the fallen sword of the House Stark. _A grave wrought of crystals_ , Mance thought, and his thought could have easily become a verse.

The dragon blew again to the cocoon he created, this time spurting well-aimed jets of fire. Where they hit the glass, minuscule cracks was made, letting some air on the inside. Mance Rayder wondered if the dragon knew for certain whether the man inside still lived. He found that he could move his limbs again, and it was just on time, to avoid Gregor's blow as the fighting resumed. A black presence was behind his back, and Mance instinctively stepped aside, only to avoid a gust of bright red flames which engulfed Gregor's body, and no one else's, more precise than a skilled archer who never misses its target. Mance watched how Gregor burned much faster than any other wight, and how the red of the fire first turned him into ash, and then to nothing at all. It seemed that the dragonfire was indeed stronger, as the King-beyond-the-Wall secretly hoped, able to the destroy not only the wights, but also the Others, and monsters of black magic. _We will see,_ he thought. Loras, to his surprise, did not show any signs of attacking Mance. _Lord Euron did not include me in his command,_ Mance Rayder thought absurdly, as the wights ran passed him on their way towards Sandor Clegane's black grave guarded by the black dragon. Contrary to the expectations of the King-beyond-the-Wall, of more fire and blood, the beast just lazily spread its wings and returned where it came from, behind the clouds, seemingly in a hurry to be somewhere else, which was not there.

"No!" Mance heard himself screaming.

But the avalanche of wights broke down on the dragonglass. No force could move it, or harm it in any way. It stood like a boulder, like a mountain, the substance it was made of more firm than Valyrian steel, resistant to any weapon, to fire, and to the unnatural force of the dead. Moqorro released a thick black shadow upon it, but as soon as it touched the glass it was absorbed and dismembered by it until it disappeared. No change was visible in the glittering black surface. The ironborn and the wights threw daggers and axes in the air, eager to harm the black dragon. But the animal was already gone far beyond their reach.

At that moment, an army of the living came yelling from the woods, the red and the black three headed dragons spitting fire from their shields and chests. The wights fought bravely, but they were unused to such enemy, and they started losing ground. Willas's horsemen and horsewomen joined the battle too, using torches as much as their swords. _The magic of the dragons,_ Mance thought, observing.

At the head of his army walked Aegon, barely more than a boy with silver hair, waving a mighty sword. There was no dragon on his chest, nor on his shield, but he was followed by a black hooded woman whose sole presence terrified the wights. She never lost the sight of her king; the dead would not approach him as long as she was by his side. The Young King was nearing the ship, fighting his way to Euron, cutting through the ironborn as he went, but he was not fast enough. Moqorro whispered something to Euron, and whatever he had said made Euron's arrogance resurrect in full splendour.

"Thank you for your hospitality, good people of Highgarden," he cried. "I will now take my leave from you, but I will remember your insolence when I return. The Lord of Light bids me fly first to the capital of the Seven Kingdoms, where the most beautiful woman in the world, the Mother of Dragons, will kiss me of her own free will. So say the flames, and they do not lie. And then, anything I want will be mine!"

With that, a huge black shadow rose from the small tripod of fire kindled by the Red Priest, larger than the one which created the semblance of the Long Night over Highgarden. It wrapped the ship, and gathered under its wing of darkness the entire army of wights, and the ranks of Euron's slaves with their baskets full of flowers. Mance was blinded, and whatever it was that had been happening, he found that he could only wait. When darkness receded, the army of the dead, the ship and the slaves were gone, nowhere to be seen, leaving the Young King wide-eyed, empty-handed, and his sword thirsty for blood.

Mance rubbed his hurting eyes, glancing at the riderless white horse that used to be Jaime's. There, on the side, the cursed black candle was still burning despite Gregor being transformed into nothingness, from where he could certainly not return by any magic, old or new. _It would seem that Qyburn was wrong,_ Mance thought, _he never lit this candle. It was beyond his power to do it._ Qyburn, for all his wicked wisdom, had no idea what kept the glass candle burning, the wildling discovered. It must have been lit for a completely different reason. By the arrival of winter, the waking up of the white walkers, or plain and simply dragons. There were plenty of possibilities. Mance decided to look after it until he found out what the candle was, or Jaime Lannister returned from his unwanted dragon flight to claim his property.

Decided to leave the white horse to Willas, he loaded Jaime's bag with the glass candle and the White Book of the Kingsguard on the back of Patience. Mance Rayder trotted to the woods before anyone could stop him, with the intention to catch up with the Elder Brother and Lady Brienne. He ignored the unmanly childlike cries of the Young King who was just being given a message from a raven. The bird appeared exhausted, and it cawed weakly in Aegon's hands. _The kneelers can sort their problems by themselves,_ Mance judged _._ Someone called after him still. It was Willas, the crippled lord. "Shouldn't we burn him too, if he wakes to… to another kind of life?" he asked for advice, pointing at the Hound resting in peace in his black crystal tomb.

And as he did only once before in his long life of the wildling, Mance Rayder decided against it. The first and the only time he had chosen not to burn a body, it was he, Mance, who had killed a man who did not deserve to die. So he left him in the snow knowing what kind of life he might have condemned him to. He could never forgive himself for what he did, but much less could he have burned the man he killed. Both his deeds were an offence screaming to the Old Gods for punishment. Which came to him tenfold when he was a prisoner in Winterfell and was forced to watch the spearwives die.

"You do not burn a living man," he told Willas, to justify his decision. He could not burn the Hound, even against the man's expressed will in the matter. It would be the height of injustice, equal to having let the Boltons take their skin to their grave. The wondrous work of dragonglass would protect Sandor Clegane's body from abuse. And maybe the old gods would finally open their eyes to see. Maybe they would look kindly at the man who sacrificed himself for a chance that their people, up north, may live. _It should appeal to them, the fate of a man willing to die to set the wild animals free,_ Mance believed. _Maybe they would bring him back._

Or maybe Mance's lie, when spoken, became the truth as it so often came to pass, and Sandor Clegane was alive. "Let him be," the King-beyond-the-Wall ordered Willas, as a true lord would. "You owe me a debt for defending your city. Let him be, and when he wakes, give him the swiftest of your horses to follow us to the capital. I hope to see him there before the week is over."

The time was nigh, the horn was on its way, and both Aegon and Daenerys would now have no choice other than to hear his play out, until the very end.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, the only character I have irreparably killed in this chapter, without any hope of survival, is Gregor.
> 
> Really looking forward to any comments on this one. Thank you for reading.


	39. You Don't Want to Wake The Dragon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the dragons seem to do as they please

**Jaime**

In a dream, Jaime Lannister was kidnapped by a creamy-coloured dragon when he understood that the Hound of all men was intending to set up an example of knightly valour: to lay down his life in protection of the weak. He shouted the truth to the King-beyond-the-Wall, protesting against this course of events, only to end up being taken to the clouds against his own will. His empty words could not pierce their dark woolly thickness.

Above, the world still had light. The white-winged animal hovered peacefully, ignoring how Jaime screeched at it, helplessly hitting its head, pulling the spikes on its neck to make it angry, and force it to drop him. "Take me down, you beast! I have to tell them!" The dragon did not understand human speech so it could not be offended, but Jaime still tried. "Kraken licking monster!" he called it in his wrath.

He screamed and he kicked the hard body covered in thick white luminous scales, but all he received was a calm circular path of flight over the layer of the black clouds. He understood that the weather of the world was not half as gloomy as the one Euron's priest conjured upon Highgarden. He kept yelling hoping someone would hear him nevertheless, and _stop_ Clegane from whatever he was doing.

He couldn't explain why he wanted Clegane to live. Maybe because if he could, so could Jaime. They were equally guilty of the things they had done in the past.

The white dragon dived down again, and Jaime filled up his lungs with air, prepared to launch the truth from the bottom of his soul as soon as he would see the mummers' company on the ground. An immaterial presence clutched at his wind pipe then, hampering his breath. Two notions started a violent fight in his fast working mind which was rapidly losing consciousness. One was a familiar burden of regrets he carried, and the second one a very simple unbreakable demand, more simple than most men ever dared to use when addressing Jaime.

 _Shut up,_ the immaterial presence commanded, or so he understood it.

Jaime did not want to obey it, so his throat constricted further. The load of regrets grew bolder, larger than a hill, bigger than a mountain, until Jaime couldn't take the size of it. He fainted, with only enough time to regret his own uselessness in everything, way before he would have glimpsed the ship or any of his companions.

His second dream was even more unusual than his first one.

Jaime Lannister rarely dreamed of the sea. Mostly, when asleep, he would see people. Men, women and children haunting him. Sometimes he would face them and sometimes he would be desperately trying to hide. Rhaegar and his dead Kingsguard on formidable galloping horses, none of them white except for the mighty horse of Ser Arthur Dayne, rushing at him strongly, with naked flaming swords… Of late, their eyes could turn blue as the deadly gaze of winter. The face of the Mad King spilling blood from his dead mouth after a golden sword had pierced his bony back while Aerys II had still been shaking in laughter, about to urge his pyromancers to burn the city down. The Starks too occupied his dreams, little Brandon, Eddard and Catelyn, and their young daughters he never looked at good enough at the court of Robert Baratheon, unimportant as they were to him at that time. He would most probably not be able to recognise them if he ever encountered one of them face to face in the riverlands. He would not be able to return them to Catelyn Stark as he had promised her when she was still alive.

Jaime had never dreamed of Cersei, not in his sleep, only in his waking hours.

But now, here, there, everywhere, encrusted in all the layers of his latest flagrant dream, there was an undulating, billowing sea. Differently coloured than the grey sea in Lannisport where he learned how to swim as a little boy. His father thought little and less of that art. Yet the future Lord of Casterly Rock and a noble Westerman could not be seen as any less capable than the coastal smallfolk of the westerlands, most of whom could dive like the silvery fish of their waters. Same was true for the ironborn, the axe-armed brutes who sailed south to plunder the Lannister and the Tyrell domain alike. So Jaime swallowed cold salty water and learned, until Lord Tywin was satisfied.

The sea in his dream glimmered blue and green, bright colours clashing against each other under the sky of the palest, faintest light. It must have been dusk, or dawn, or not quite. Jaime inhaled deeply the clear blue colour of the sky, and the air smelled sweet, of salt and trees, and something unknown. _Pines_ , he thought, _there must be pines._ He stretched his arms and legs on a warm bony surface he was sprawled on, lazily. Once, in the riverlands, he dreamed of a woman who stood by his side when Rhaegar's dead knights appeared. He was too dizzy and he didn't know her name.

And his limbs paddled the hollow light air of the empty skies, losing hold and grip of anything. Jaime's eyes shot wide open, his somnolence gone for good.

He was not dreaming.

He was falling rapidly down from the back of the dragon, sinking through the weightless clear blue sky like an avalanche rolling down the mountain. With little and less chance of survival once it would meet the bottom of the slope.

 _Brienne_ , he thought of the woman he dreamed about in the Riverlands as soon as he was fully awake. He stared at the white clouds and the sun above with huge green eyes, admiring their unearthly loveliness. He didn't have time to be properly afraid because his fall, faster than the lightning, was stayed quicker still by a long creamy snout that had caught him unawares under his back, almost immediately after he regained his senses. A giant bird-like leg secured one of his muscular ones, and he acutely sensed its long claw piercing his flesh. It was not as painful as a blade which cut off his sword hand, but it came very close.

He looked up then, and he found himself eye to eye with a white headed, almost golden-eyed dragon.

"Hello," he said, remembering how the animal took him and where he was when it happened. For some reason, he was less angry with the beast than before. He found you could not be upset with a dragon when you looked straight in its eyes. They were young and confused. Uncertain. "You wouldn't know by any chance if Lord Greyjoy lost the horn, would you? Or where Lady Brienne has gone? Or if Sandor Clegane still lives?" He found he didn't much care if Mance Rayder, or even the Elder Brother survived, disliking the feeling, yet it was there. He didn't know what that made him. _An oathbreaker? Worse? A heartless bastard?_

 _Gone, gone, gone_ , the familiar nameless presence cheered, clear as a sound of cymbals over the castle in the moonlit summer night, good for dancing and making love. The unseen voice veered in the sinuous alleys of Jaime's consciousness, shedding light of unstoppable joy in the places of Jaime's mind where he never dared to enter on his own. They were entirely too dark. More obscure than the most dishonourable deeds he did or had seen done. More mad than Aerys had ever been. The abysmal firepit of his own unruly thoughts which the reason-obsessed Lord Tywin would never be able to understand.

Jaime laughed, relieved, not knowing what he was laughing at.

The dragon used his reaction to haul him back on its back, as a wooden puppet on a fair would be brought back on the stage by its masters.

The dragon then licked its right claw, ruthlessly, and spat a jet of yellow flames into the clear blue air for good measure of its strength. Or in another expression of bliss, there was no way to tell. Jaime tapped the beast's neck, grateful that it forgot to exhale flames before, where it would roast him alive. "Good dragon," he said, wondering what in the seven heavens took possession of him to talk to one in the first place. His initial wonder soon gave way to a much more enormous one. He couldn't grasp what he had done to earn a ride on its back, and not a swift passage to its belly. The dragons were known for their gnawing hunger and unmeasurable cruelty.

 _Or were they?_ Jaime considered that this belief may have been nothing more than that, an act of blind faith in old stories, where all real knowledge of the beasts had faded from Westeros with the disappearance of the dragons.

"You would have eaten me by now if you so wanted, wouldn't you?" he asked, amused all of a sudden.

The presence moved up and down creating ripples of unease in Jaime's head. _No hunger_ , it suggested, with stark whiteness. _Water._ It pleaded. Immediately, Jaime felt like he should drink as well, but the only water around them and under them was salty, and would not quench their thirst.

"Any name I should call you?" Jaime asked mockingly, not expecting any answer.

The dragon suddenly dived downward, in an elegant flying manoeuvre, fast and strong as a thunder, until he nearly touched the surface of the crystal blue water. There it hovered briefly, letting Jaime slide off his back by initialling an unexpected strong shake of the scales and spikes that adored it. The beast didn't cut the man that time, at least.

Jaime heard before he could experience a splash of his own body penetrating the waves. The dragon was almost gone back to the sky when a presence stated, clearer than anything it tried to say before: _Viserion._

"Viserion," Jaime repeated lest he forgets the odd name, reminding him of Rhaegar's escaped brother, a frightened youth who in time may have had grown to be as cruel as Aerys. _Or as deranged as Joffrey, who was my own son_ , Jaime thought with guilt, as he yelled to the pattern of golden wings disappearing in the sky, struggling to keep his blond head out of water, making way too many unnecessary movements with his feet. "My name is Jaime!"

The sky was empty and clear. There were no birds, and decidedly no dragons. The beast decided to leave him without looking back.

It was a good thing Jaime didn't wear armour when he rode out of Highgarden on a white horse. He did it because it only made him slower to fight off the wights and in the cold embrace of water it would have probably meant his death if he would not manage to take it off. Strokes came naturally; he had to slice the waves with arms and add speed with his legs, lest he freezes to death, like in Lannisport.

After a while, he understood he could relent. The water he was in was different, almost as pleasant as a bath turned tepid. The sun dried out his eyes and his lips, and if the thirst was not slowly becoming unbearable, he would have thoroughly enjoyed the sensation. He tasted the water and it was saltier than on the coast of his homeland. A look into the distance revealed a brown line.

A new shore.

Jaime turned on his back and found that floating was easier in the warm, too salty water, than in the grey western seas. He advanced backward in a good rhythm, occasionally turning on his chest so that his sight could check on the thin brown line of salvation, ever closer on the horizon. He kept swimming and thinking about the dragon. Of where it had gone and what it wanted from him.

Not any wiser, his feet found firm land under water. He walked out of it, shaking from effort. It was the longest swim of his life. The beach was not sandy as it should have been, but instead covered with pearly cobble stone, perfectly rounded in shapes of unequal sizes.

He lay on his back to dry, having to blink away the blinding light of the sun shining over the immense surface of the blue sea in front. Only the leg scratched by Viserion spoiled the moment, hurting as the water slowly evaporated from damaged skin, leaving a trail of salt behind.

There was a party of armed knights patrolling the beach. He was captured before he could properly recover, soaked and improper when he was brought to their lord. The castle was simple and clean, on a high cliff set against the sea. The lord's solar was spacious and decorated with taste. The surroundings were modest and no family sigil was visible on furniture.

"Send the raven to King's Landing," the tall elderly lord claimed from his high seat. Either of the Targaryen kings will accept our loyalty and spare our lands the pillage and the burning if we send the Kingslayer as the coronation gift.

"My lord," Jaime said cynically. "It is most kind of you to offer me the hospitality of your dungeons. Could it come with a set of dry clothing and a bowl of brown or any other such nonsense you call food in this land?"

"This is no land," said one of the knights who got him out of water. "We are an island."

A premonition took Jaime harsher than the cold hand of death would. He looked the lord in his eyes, and they were blue like the sea under his castle. The living blue of the long summer, not the unnatural one of the soulless wights. The man stood up to his full height and he was half a head taller than Jaime. A bit taller than the woman he started to love for the choosing of his heart, and not because the fate pushed them to the world together. Jaime didn't need to see a sigil anymore to know who the old lord was and where he was.

"My lord," he told him then, as arrogantly as he was able to, gambling his life on the weight of his new assumptions. "You are making a grievous mistake. I have not come to Tarth as your enemy. I come on an errand which is solely my own. I would speak of it to you in private if you would so allow."

Selwyn Tarth dismissed the knights of his house and asked the Kingslayer to join him at the dinner table. When the first course was served, Jaime started coughing for he was still cold, and no change of garments was brought for the asking.

"My lord," Lord Tarth rattled out his courtesies, as of yet unconvinced of the wisdom of his choice. "If you please, what do you seek in Tarth then? I cannot believe that a man of you stature has visited us for the beauty of our waters..."

"Indeed not," Jaime said and pulled the most serious of faces. "Lord Tarth," he nearly stuttered. "I have come here to ask the hand of your daughter, Lady Brienne, in marriage."

He didn't come to do anything like that, but as soon as the words have left his mouth he knew it was exactly what he wanted for very long. Even in the short while when he believed she betrayed him, just like Cersei had done.

Lord Tarth stood up as fast as his advanced age allowed, yelling after his servants. "Shoot down the raven! Stop it! Now! Lord Lannister is Brienne's betrothed and we will treat him as such. The business of the Seven Kingdoms matters not when it comes to the happiness of my daughter."

The rest of the evening was easy. Jaime avoided answering questions about Brienne's well-being, merely stating what he desired to be the truth. He told Lord Selwyn that she was faithfully waiting for him in the capital, a most honourable _maid_ as she was. He was very keen to dissipate any ill-intended talk that he was marrying her out of any misplaced obligation or pity. After a second glass of wine he invented in cold blood that Brienne took service with Daenerys Stormborn, one of the best placed contenders with valid claim to the Iron Throne. After the fifth glass, absorbing the cold of the water from his smouldering blood, he admitted out loud that he loved her, with all his heart.

Brave knights didn't dare to laugh, servants giggled in approval, and Lord Selwyn clapped hands in pure happiness, ordering the best of his wine to be served in honour of his daughter's betrothal. Both men feasting to honour Brienne carefully avoided to touch upon Jaime's precarious position in the new Targaryen order in the realm.

Jaime drank moderately from that moment on, and he found that his thoughts were frequently drawn back to the dragon.

Hoping beyond hope that if it was able to tell him its name, the word " _gone_ " Viserion uttered when Jaime asked about the fate of his companions may have meant that they escaped safe and sound, taking the horn with them.

**Septa Lemore**

Lord Petyr Baelish came to Septa Lemore's chamber very late, the night before her sentencing to death.

He came strong at her, in her bed made of dark red silk, _my own bed of blood,_ she mused, and he was unaware of his danger. Not knowing that her dagger, a rare black jewel gleaming on its hilt, was more than ready to become acquainted with the space between the ribs of any intruder. The fragile casing of the mocking bird's chest would serve that purpose well. Septa Lemore was no innocent. She chose to avoid his heart, and she didn't hold it on his neck as Petyr would be wont to do. Instead she pressed the thin blade on the throbbing thing he dared to call his manhood when even the smallfolk knew better, calling him Littlefinger to reflect the sad nature of his condition.

"Lord Baelish," she said calmly, disentangling herself from his attempt to embrace her, standing sharply at the window where she had welcomed old Selmy, days ago. She cried her eyes out after he had left her for the very first time in twenty long years, for all the things long gone and all those that could still be, if the gods so wanted, and if the fate was kinder than she deserved.

"Septa Lemore," he acknowledged her, savouring gingerly another of his well plotted victories, despite a minor setback he had suffered.

She had to give him one thing. In all circumstances the Lord of the Fingers would always find a proper way with words. She briefly wondered if that faculty would have abandoned him if she had pressed her blade further down through the fabric of his smallclothes.

"I thought you favoured younger women in your bed," she observed. "Or is it only because I will not be able to talk about it tomorrow evening, when my flesh starts cooling down, turned into a cloud of ashes blown by the wind? I hear that you mean to burn me."

"Who has come to see you?" he asked with doubt.

"No one as you well know," Lemore said to the night, watching it pass through the barred window of her chamber. "Your spies have been watching all the entrances, and you have searched my room beforehand for secret exits."

Baelish paced the room like a thin-legged grasshopper from the marshes of Rhoyne. "I wonder," he said, "what would you say to a proposition."

"Speak, by all means," she retorted. "I am not eager to die just yet. I still find that Aegon, whom I love as my son, could at least be present for what he had ordered done."

"If you admit publicly to being Ashara Dayne and to Aegon not being Rhaegar's son but your bastard with Brandon Stark, whom Varys falsely presented to the Golden Company as Rhaegar's son and heir, the High Septon would be able to revoke your sentence. It is against the Seven for the children to command the murder of their parents, no matter their crimes. You would live for the rest of your days in the septry of your choosing."

"Interesting," she said. "And what of Aegon and Varys? They would follow my lead on a gibbet if I dare foresee their destiny..."

"Why would you care what destiny befalls that heartless son of yours who has sentenced you to die?" Baelish said fervently, the power of suggestion strong in his false voice. "Even I was shocked by the revelation of what his hand has written, and I have seen many sad things in my life, mind you, my lady. I wanted to stay the High Septon's hand until Aegon returns! But, alas, with the parchment in which he unrolled his hatred and outlined the danger to the realm that could come of you, there was nothing I could have done…"

"And we seal our pact by you leaving the mark on my elderly flesh, is that what you would want?" she inquired, for the sake of confirmation.

"It would give me an argument against you in case you decide to betray our _arrangement_ in the eyes of the people. Two of my men are watching us. They would be witnesses. I am not as bad a lover as my size would let you believe. You are Dornish. Do not try to tell me that my proposal comes as scandalous to one as yourself."

"And Jon Connington?" she asked, timidly, acting as if she were considering his suggestion.

"Lord Connington is gone after the young King, I'm afraid. He couldn't find a raven to send after him, and he is not convinced of the, unfortunately, manifest authenticity of his orders regarding your person."

Septa Lemore laughed then, and the walls of the Red Keep returned tenfold the sound of her laughter, powerful like a storm, mirthful and simple like the unspoiled love between young lovers who only see each other in the depths of the night.

"Lord Baelish," she started, barely containing her outburst. "You have surely thought of everything."

"But you forget one thing," she continued. "High Septon is surely not my son, being quite a bit older than the humble number of my name days. And I am a septa now, no matter what I was before, what you know of who I am, or what you would wish me to confess. My death is certain, with or without the confession you demand. Or you would not be here talking to me as freely as you are. It is not your way, to be so careless.

And for the confession you dare requesting, I may have lived across the sea, but the little birds have brought me tidings how Brandon's brother, Eddard, publicly confessed his so-called crimes in front of the Great Sept of Baelor in exchange for three lives, those of his daughters first, and then his own. He lost his own life as soon as he did that, and the crown never had the younger one of his daughters. And if the older one still lives, it is by mere chance, and not because of a promise made to Eddard."

The way the mocking bird shifted his light body weight from one foot to another did not escape the pious septa. _So Varys is right_ , she thought, _Petyr must have had something with Lord Stark's death._ And _Lemore, Lemore, Lemore_ , she repeated the name she had chosen, _Septa Lemore guards well not only her tongue but even and more so her thoughts in dark places like the Red Keep._

She would never confess to what they were asking of her even if they were not a bunch of liars, and Aegon a hurt young man who hated her for poisoning him for years.

"You should have brought with you a mystery bard to sing me a sweet song, in place of rats, and spies," she told him. "The smallfolk say that his harp is wrought of silver strings like the high harp of Prince Rhaegar used to be, haven't you heard? Then maybe I would have chosen to lay with you. Or perhaps you would have seen the error of your ways before it is too late."

"I don't know what you are talking about," Petyr said in a fatherly tone. "I have heard that prisoners awaiting death lose their mind. It has clearly happened to you. I will ask the High Septon to say a prayer for your soul."

With that he left her, even if she was certain that his spies did not.

In the morning, she lifted up the torrent of her hair in a proper headdress and regretted only so slightly walking to meet her destiny dressed like a septa. It was not proper. She imagined Lord Eddard would have walked tall and proud to his death, even knowing beforehand that it awaited him, if only he could walk. Varys told her how he could not walk on his own because of the festering wound on his leg, caused by young Jaime Lannister… The most promising young sworn brother of the Kingsguard in Rhaegar's eyes… Whom he loved as a brother… Septa Lemore had to laugh again, just so that she wouldn't cry.

 _Tears are good for nothing,_ she reminded herself, breaking her fast by swallowing her old pain.

She looked around and expected Arthur or Rhaegar to burst through the door at any moment, joking and cheering about jousting and women, as in the times where the Red Keep rang with laughter, before Aerys was captured in Duskendale. In the times that may have never existed. One of them would offer her an arm to walk her to the high table, the purple in his eyes reflecting the dark glow in her own. Their lips would meet greedily on the way there, in the corners of the Keep where there were no little birds, and no watchful eyes.

But different people would come for her soon. Just before they did, the white-headed eagle returned. She could see it through the window, its head slightly moist from the drops of silvery rain in the high skies it must have journeyed upon. She smiled to the bird through the bars, knowing that, come what may, she was not going to wait for the end of her days alone.

**Sansa**

Sansa walked among deep shadows, only one in a long line of slaves moving through the forest. They meandered following the roseroad through the fields. The black ship was carried on the road itself, the only one to enjoy that privilege. They had already walked for a day, and they slept at night. When they were woken up in the darkness, and ordered to continue, she understood it must have been morning, even if no light could be seen through the density of the clouds.

Next to her stepped again a short slender woman, the one who was with her all the time when Sandor fought Euron Greyjoy. Sansa had not seen her during the first day of their forced march at all. The black hood covered her face. She could not stand the hard rhythm of the movement imposed by some of the dead serving as guards to the flock of slaves trailing obediently up north after their one-eyed master. The woman's obvious suffering opened a soft spot in Sansa's heart and it filled her mind with something she could worry about other than her own misery.

She could not think about Sandor, not then. She owed to both of them to stay alive. She would think about her love later, and of what he did, and of what had befallen him.

Maybe if she could avoid thinking about it, the time could turn back, and none of it would be true. _His death, his death, his death would not be real, never his life._

 _He would have lived for me,_ she remembered, and her heart was filled with warmth against her will.

The slender woman stumbled, losing an odd brown shoe with many leather straps that should normally secure it to her tiny foot. Sansa picked it up when a wight with a chest wound approached them, wanting to reveal the face of the slave who was making the others walk slower, to teach her some much required order.

"I stepped on her foot, good ser," Sansa spoke politely. "Here, her shoe. She will walk now, I can ensure you."

The wights could not talk very well, so the creature gurgled something and went back to the side lines. Sansa bowed to dress the foot of a woman and took a glimpse under her hood. Stopping her mouth from going wide open in surprise. There was the woman, no, the queen who had sent Sandor to his untimely death.

Except that she didn't, and Sansa had known it all along. Sandor Clegane just couldn't let Euron Greyjoy continue with killing people after he witnessed him killing his brother. He freed the dragons instead of enslaving them. He… he… he died a true knight as surely as if he had taken the vows he despised. Sansa's eyes watered only so slightly for the first time in two days when she offered Daenerys her arm.

"Here," she said, "I will help you walk." Lilac eyes fixated blue ones from under the hood, noticing the tears. They kept walking as two young trees supporting each other for balance. The Targaryen queen was much shorter than Sansa, and she had difficulty to follow the set pace at the beginning of their daily march. But towards the end of the day Sansa became profoundly tired while the queen seemed regenerated and able to continue. When they were allowed to stop, Sansa's feet were burning, and she couldn't tell any longer if it was she who had kept Daenerys from falling or if it had been the other way around. They were told to make camp in the middle of nowhere, and Sansa assumed they didn't cross much ground. Luckily for the slaves, the ship moved as fast as humans could walk, and the feet of the dead were not moving any faster than the feet of the living. Had it been different, many of the slaves would have joined the closed ranks of the dead.

The queen slumped to the ground, too near to the black ship for Sansa's liking. She preferred to keep as far away from it in the company of slaves as she could. For if she truly had been a wolf, she would have torn Euron Greyjoy's throat apart with her teeth, wondering if the blood that would run from it would be red like Sandor's or black like the blood of his dead brother. _Both dead now_ , a small voice said, but Sansa simply refused to believe it.

As luck always seemed to fail Sansa, ever since she left the safety of Winterfell walls as an eleven year old child, Euron and his priest were strolling through the camp. They chose to stand next to Sansa and Daenerys, who for her part resembled a dead tree trunk crumpled too closely to the ground.

"I haven't seen these two," Euron said, intrigued, his voice sounding repulsively human, no longer the voice of a killing monster. Sansa had a suspicion that the most beautiful woman, whom he imagined would kiss him willingly, could be Daenerys, and somehow she knew it was _not_ what the queen wanted. It was not the same like talking to Sandor's horse, or sensing Sandor's wishes and hesitations. The queen's mute rejection of everything that Euron was resounded with such force that her burning black hatred was almost palpable in the air around them, darker than the magic that coloured the day into the night. Maybe Lord Greyjoy was drawn to it, or his priest, by his awful life threatening magic he dared to call the magic of light. So Sansa faced Euron squarely with her eyes big from crying, and spoke with sadness, bowing her beautiful head with utmost humility. "Your Grace, we have both lost husbands in the glorious battle of Highgarden. Let us be in our mourning. We will pray for the victory of Your Grace in the ongoing war, once you regain the dragons, which are rightfully yours!"

"Well spoken for a peasant," Euron voiced more suspicion.

"I am not a peasant, ser, I was taken from Highgarden," Sansa answered, faking being offended, inventing a name similar to the one she was forced to wear. "My name is Elayne Flowers, a bastard of the House Fossoway. My husband's father was a steward to the old Lord Fossoway, and I was castle raised in a sign of the lord's gratitude for his faithful service."

"Your Grace," the red priest helped her, unknowingly, sniffing the air. "You should not waste time with the slaves. Your army needs presence, and leadership. It will take us at least two weeks to arrive to King's Landing, and Aegon will return before us."

"And Daenerys, my bride to be?" the one-eyed lord asked giddily.

"Our spies know not where she is," Moqorro said. "Her servants repeat the lie that she is flying her dragon, but her dragon has left her as you have witnessed. The big brute has set them all free, to ravage, and to destroy. Dragons have no mother. We have to retake the horn to regain mastery over them, and with it the lordship of all Westeros!"

"I wonder…" Euron said dreamily before he turned angry, and ugly, again. "To find that woman who took it in the woods will not come easy. She is only one among a thousand trees and plants," he hissed. "So unless your fires can tell us precisely where she is going-"

"-Take faith, Your Grace," Moqorro interrupted.

"The battle of our time will take place under the walls of King's Landing," the priest of the Lord of Light said convincingly. "So I have read in my flames. The true king will come forward under the majestic wall, many feet high, that weeps in the sunlight and hardens with the moonlight. There can be no other wall in Westeros to match the magnificence of the one I have seen in my fires, other than the dragonlord-built fortifications of your capital, famous even across the sea!"

"Good," Euron nodded absentmindedly and left, his attention little and less, as soon as the predictions of R'hllor did not concern beautiful women. Sansa was glad for it and she silently thanked the Mother and the old gods that Moqorro was not a Westerosi. For there was a very different Wall that the flames may have revealed to their priest.

The Wall made of blocks of ice far up north, where her last living brother was the Lord Commander, for the time being.

"Thank you," a voice Sansa imagined as violet as the eyes it belonged to, if voices would have any colour, told her from under the black hood. "For helping me now. For what your sworn shield did in Highgarden. For everything."

A kind word broke Sansa's heart where the two days march could not. She didn't want to be lost in the army of wights and slaves next to the Dragon Queen who had lost all of her dragons. She wanted Sandor Clegane, and he was _gone_. Sobs came, strong as when she lost her father, wrenching as when she lost her little brothers, heart-breaking as when she lost her mother and Robb.

She hugged her knees and cried, convulsively. "Sandor," she murmured.

"Is he your sun and stars then?" a lilac whisper asked with respect. Sansa did not understand the meaning of the words but the Hound had truly become that, and more to her, more than she was able to comprehend, or put in words. She nodded between unladylike sounds she couldn't stop herself from making.

A thin bony arm encircled her shoulders stiff from crying. The soft coloured voice murmured, more confident and honest than the misread prophecies of the foreign priest. "Do not despair. All may yet be well. Euron has woken the dragon. And none of them gathered here know what a true dragon is capable of."

**Septa Lemore**

They didn't build her funeral pyre on the stairs of the Great Sept of Baelor as Septa Lemore had imagined they would do. _It would suit the righteous nature of the High Septon_ , she believed, in a twisted sense, like the death of fire was well chosen for her, in the proper upside down order of the world.

 _Mud Gate would have to do for a traitor and a murderer in a skin of a woman_ , she guessed. The stake was high as if she were the Mountain himself, and not a very moderately tall woman when out of her shoes. Curious people pressed on the clearing, eyes pried among the city walls, through all the openings and from the top. The heralds read her crimes: she was the hidden priestess of the red god deceiving His Holiness to be a pious septa, she was the murderer of Lady Sansa Stark, almost betrothed of King Aegon VI, the most innocent and accomplished of the ladies in the court, and she attempted to take the life of the Young King himself by a nefarious poison, the tears of Lys. But the grace of the Seven protected the King, so he still lived, and she only very nearly murdered an innocent young couple in his stead.

She would have laughed again if the morning was not perversely beautiful. A good morning for everything, for life, and for death. The white-headed eagle circled high up above her head in the open skies. And she had done what she could to save herself, and to help save others.

When the flames started slowly leaping towards her dress, from the bottom of her bed of dry branches, she did not want to look down. She looked up to the eagle, trying to breathe for as much as she could, for as long as possible. She refused to lower her gaze, not wanting the possibly last thing she would see to be the furtive glances of her justices and headsmen. She didn't want to see old Selmy, in case that he had been crying.

She chose to look up, as she always did, always further, always higher.

There was only one thing left to do.

To hope.

**Ser Barristan**

Ser Barristan Selmy would have ordered the Unsullied forward even before they bothered to start the fire. He would have done it, if a black coloured premonition did not counsel him to wait, or if he didn't follow the gaze of the bravest among the ladies, searching hard for something in the abandoned sky.

He stood in front of the palanquin of the queen as a Lord Commander of the Queensguard should do. The litter was warded off by long opaque curtains of heavily perfumed yellow silk they brought from Meereen. "To protect Queen Daenerys' gentle disposition from the cruelty of the spectacle she would be witnessing", Ser Barristan had told the High Septon when they arrived, and His Holiness accepted it.

Ser Barristan hoped that the queen would forgive him for ruining all the stocks of her favourite fabric when she returned. She was still away, wherever she had gone with her dragon, having left before Aegon rode off from the capital with the Golden Company. _It is for the good cause, and Daenerys has a heart of gold_ , Ser Barristan thought, sparing a short glance to the curtains.

Gendry and the younger Lady Stark were hidden in the queen's palanquin, to see if the shock of the burning fire and the unhealthy cheering of the crowd would wake up Lady Arya from the slumber that threatened her life. The wolf had to be left behind for the litter was not that big.

Ser Barristan searched the sky thoroughly.

That was how he had seen it before the lady on the pyre did, way before, and he stayed his hand. The Grey Worm urged him to act, but he decisively kept his old arm lowered, thus ordering the commander of the queen's army to do the same.

He had seen it clearly before anyone else did, and it was going to be better than anything they could have done. He thoroughly enjoyed the victorious small look he secretly handed over to Lord Baelish and to His Holiness who were not far from him, staring at the flames with satisfaction. _You look too much down to the earth, my lords, and you forget that there is the sky,_ Ser Barristan Selmy celebrated in silence.

The smallfolk, who usually noticed everything before their betters did, to ensure their survival in the world as it was, observed it next.

"A dragon!" someone shouted.

"A dragon!" another repeated the call.

"Queen Daenerys!" they screamed, seeing her dragon. "King Aegon!" judged the others.

"Prince Rhaegar come to life!" "Baelor the Blessed!"

"Aegon the Conqueror!" the cries multiplied. "Nymeria, the Warrior Queen!"

There were as many opinions as there were voices.

Lord Baelish and the High Septon finally looked up to the skies and their faces did not reveal fear. Only the pouting of a child whose game of knights and their battles has been spoiled in the field before it could come to fruition.

The dragon was black, and its rider not very well visible in the highest, descending sharply to the mountain of roaring flames with the fainting frail figure of the woman at its top. Ser Barristan somehow knew that she yet lived. It would take more than fumes and hatred, to choke one of the greatest ladies in Westeros.

The rider had long silver hair, flying free like a broad veil shining in the sun, above the glittering black scales and spikes of the wings and the body of the dragon. It was not the beast, it was its rider who disentangled the woman from her would be grave. The rider's legs caught fire at that, but the inconvenience didn't stop the unlikely saviour from standing on the burning pyre, reaching to the woman and freeing her from her bonds. The dragon soared back to the sky, unstoppable, free, his wings darkening the sun. In another moment, it would have disappeared out of all sight.

As an afterthought, the dragon turned around and flew towards the high dais where the high lords and ladies witnessed the sentencing. A mighty roar it made, and a first faint sign of worry graced the face of Lord Baelish at the sound. The High Septon pretended to ignore the black dread, not moving a muscle on his old face.

The dragon chose to hover above the dais, still very high up, safely out of the reach of the archers. Ser Barristan stared, expecting the unavoidable. He had seen the wrath of the dragon before and he could only imagine the number of the victims, hoping that at least Aegon's Kingsguard of children would be spared. Drogon opened its large mouth. A mighty jet of fire surged forward like lightning. The flames had the exact hue of the fire that nearly killed the woman Drogon and his rider had come to save. It ran past all the people, not harming a soul. _A fair warning, precise and deadly_ , Ser Barristan understood. The dragonflame buried itself to the dais between His Holiness and the master of coin, burning a hole in the ground at least 20 feet deep.

Lord Baelish took an uncertain step on the side, and the High Septon only had eyes for the heavens, maybe hoping that the Warrior would come out of them, and defeat the dragon, who only waved its tail, and spread its wings in preparation for a long flight.

Lord Baelish bellowed at Ser Barristan. "Tell Princess Daenerys Stormborn to return the prisoner! Septs Lemore has to answer for her crimes in the name of King Aegon, Sixth of His Name!"

"The Lord Commander of the Queensguard does not command his queen," Ser Baristan reminded him. "He obeys her in everything!"

"Seize the emissary of the false Queen Daenerys," the High Septon barked to his servants when the dragon was far enough, and he could master the gift of speech again. "Open the palanquin! They have lied to us! The queen has never been here!"

The Warrior's Sons made a step forward. The smallfolk started moving away, taking shelter among the houses, clearing the space in front of the Mud Gate, sensing trouble.

"You all know the words of the House Targaryen," Ser Barristan announced coldly, his right arm on the pommel of his sword. "Unless you want the blood spilled to be yours, you will let us leave in peace. If Prince Aegon has any claim to make to the queen, he is welcome to treat with her when he returns. Daenerys Stormborn, the rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and the Mother of Dragons will not talk to, or receive any of you."

He raised his left arm, and the Unsullied moved forward as one body of limbs and steel, facing the Warrior's Sons, whom they may have equalled in number, yet they greatly surpassed the forces of the Faith in training and discipline. Ser Barristan knew that he had won the battle before it had even started, and his old heart was glad for it. _There will be other battles to fight, and none of them too soon_ , he hoped.

"How did she do that?" Lord Mace Tyrell asked with honest curiosity. "Princess Daenerys passed through the fire coming to no harm..."

"Lord former Hand," Ser Barristan deigned addressing the Warden of the South. "I am certain that the other members of King Aegon's small council can advise you on that more than I can, _knowledgeable_ as they are in the lore of the great houses of Westeros. I can only offer one explanation."

He felt the pressure of all the eyes, noble and common alike. The soul of the crowd was predating upon him, just like when he stood facing Prince Rhaegar at the end of the lists in the Lord Whent's tourney in Harrenhal. Before he lost the battle of his life and the only woman he loved.

"What thing?" Mace Tyrell spoke but it was the multitude that demanded an answer be given.

Ser Barristan Selmy grinned, understanding at last, what his new queen tried to teach him about her, and about all the Targaryens, past or present, insane or not, when she would say, and he only repeated it for all to hear, with Daenerys' gentle voice echoing in his head.

"You don't want to wake the dragon."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, commenting and leaving kudos :-)


	40. A Ride Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where some characters ride and the others fly back to King's Landing

**Brienne**

Brienne pushed Stranger forward fearing that all the wights in Westeros followed in their wake. A path among the centenary trees was cut open in front of them, or they were cutting it out with their large bodies as they went, she could not know. A flurry of branches marred the upright figure of both the lady and the beast as the white chrysalis around the horn of the dead dragonlords glimmered in the green, a jewel lost forever in the forest wilderness.

Despite all the odds, no pursuit came after them from out of the woods, nor down the slopes of the hills, nor from the brown muddy meadows. The woman and the black horse rode alone in an empty land that used to be populated, and green, before the inevitable change of season was announced by the maesters of the Citadel.

Brienne rode so for long and so hard that her head started spinning, unable to ponder her most recent past clearly, which was more or less what she unconsciously sought. Welcoming the numbness in which she could no longer see Jaime's shocked angry face on the back of the white dragon, swallowed by the clouds. Yes, Brienne did her duty, yes, her honour was intact as ever. Yet her obedience of a good soldier still burned her like a cowardly, unworthy act. Had she been a true knight, she would have saved him, too.

Except that she was a lady, not a knight, and what she did was an act of bravery she was not fully aware of. A battle won with great pain against tender womanly feelings dressing themselves firmly in that deep valley of her large heart where only dreams of honour and valour used to dwell. She should ride to King's Landing with great haste. Princess Daenerys had to know more about the dragons. If the gods were good, she might be able to tell Brienne what the beast intended to do with Jaime. And the Horn had to be brought to safety: Brienne was under no illusion, Lord Euron would be looking for it, and for the woman who stole from him, sooner rather than later.

The Elder Brother and Mance Rayder still haven't caught up with her as they should have done on the first day. So she continued riding.

Brienne rode for two days and two entire nights almost without stopping. On the third day she began to suspect that she may have lost her track in the wild. In the freshly risen greyness of the morning the air smelled quaint, not to her liking at all. She had to approach the roseroad, to learn where she was, more closely than she would have liked, to establish if she was still heading towards King's Landing or towards the mountains of Dorne.

After dismounting, all of a sudden sleep was a barren necessity, impossible to evade. There was no way she could have escaped it so she chose to hide in a thicket of white-berried bushes with Stranger, at the end of a large grove of elegant trees consisting mainly of redwood. It seemed like a prudent decision to take. She was near the road, dangerously so: there could be travellers and she didn't want to be seen. The black horse was unusually docile and for the first time since she left with the Horn, she allowed herself to consider more fully the unexpected bravery of his former master. _His true master_ , a man people called dog to humiliate him, just like they called her beauty. _Someone should make a song out of it all,_ she concluded as the world darkened behind her eyelids that could no longer be kept from closing.

Jaime's unconscious pretty face, when the white dragon secured the horn in the saddle with its glimmering breath, flashed before her eyes squeezed tightly shut, before Brienne yielded to Stranger. Some faithful of the Seven in Tarth believed fervently that the God of Death was also the God of Dreams, for when people slept they were lost to the world. _The dragon helped us, it helped me, not Lord Euron,_ Brienne mused, or maybe she only dreamed. _It cannot be altogether evil. It mustn't._

Her next vision was of a treasury at Evenfall Hall when she was barely more than a little girl with prickly hair, almost white from the sunlight, spilling like dry hay to the small of her back. It was long before she defied Septa Roelle and cut it to a more suitable length. _That_ was the first thing she did when she came of age. Meanwhile, Brienne, the little girl, was observing the shield her father found on his travel to Summerhall among the few treasures they possessed, singled out from the armoury for reasons only Lord Selwyn had known and kept to himself. And next to it, on a blue pillow, another thing was laid, an oddly shaped stone, smooth of surface and uneven in colour. Her father had brought it home together with the shield. Brienne never discovered what it was, and not for the lack of asking.

When Brienne woke up, she didn't remember her dream, nor was she alone. What passed for sun was high up in the sky, and what kind of travellers there were!

Not too far away from where Brienne was in hiding, two ladies she would have never expected to see in the Reach were holding each other closely, like sisters in all but blood, in front of a rather tall broad-shouldered wight with a deep cutting chest wound who was threatening them with an axe.

"We are not going back to your master, demon," the silver-haired Targaryen princess announced, facing the wight, while Lady Sansa Stark hanged nervously on her arm. "Put your axe down!"

But the wight would not, or could not do as he was told, being under Lord Euron's orders regarding his unwillingly taken slaves. When it raised its weapon to kill, the blade halted in mid-air. Brienne's eyes widened when she recognised that the dragon princess was not as alone as she looked, nor arrogant in her posture as she seemed. Black wings flapped over Brienne's hiding place and the huge scaled body of a dragon who blessed her shield in Harrenhal landed next to his Mother, his Queen, or both. The wight froze in motion too, petrified in his attack.

"Where have you seen her, Drogon?" Daenerys asked of her dragon. "Bring her, then. Best she goes with us. It will be faster. Come, my lady, take heart, things are rarely as they seem," she told Sansa. The black beast stomped decisively on two giant clawed feet, straight to the bush where Brienne was. The Lady of Tarth came out of her own will, followed by Stranger. There was no more purpose in concealment.

"Princess," she bowed to Daenerys and admitted the whole truth, blowing away her hopes of asking for mercy for Jaime, his sister and their children. "I bring you the Horn you demanded, but I was not the one who retrieved it for you. You own your gratitude to a dead man."

"We cannot know for certain," Daenerys said targeting the Lady Sansa again with a sharp purple gaze, and only then to Brienne. "What we do know is that we should better leave now while we still can. The kraken will not come even near the Horn again for as long as I draw breath," the Queen solemnly swore.

The daughter of the Lady Catelyn Stark decided to approach Stranger, caressing its mane. "Come," she told the horse quietly, arranging its saddle with great care for longer than necessary, "run back to your master. He will have need of you if he yet lives."

"But the Horn!" Brienne tried to protest when the dragon ended all reasons for her arguing. It retrieved the horn and its white casing from the saddle with its snout, lowering it under its claws with a thud. Stranger immediately trotted back in the direction he and Brienne had arrived from, obeying the Lady Sansa.

"Are you a mother to this horse," Daenerys asked, gesturing towards the dragon. "As I am Drogon's?"

"No, Your Grace," Sansa said. "In all honesty I believe that the best way to describe what I am is crippled. Only that my maiming is not visible to the outside world."

"What do you mean?"

"I had a wolf once, Your Grace," Sansa explained. "I was young, and full of faith in people. Yet I never believed in certain stories from my home, from the north, not at first, not about the horrors that lie behind the Wall, or about the cruelty of the wildlings and terrifying giants. I chose to believe in others, beautiful and filled with light, which have all proven false. So the stories of horror must all be true, Your Grace.

One of them tells how there are wargs among the men and women in the north. They can see through the eyes of an animal of their choosing, and run and fly with it if they so wish. I might have been able to walk with Lady, my wolf. But Lady was killed, and I was crippled on the inside by that loss, not knowing what has come to pass for years. Later on I was beaten for the amusement of the court, and I have lost my entire family to foes I would have never suspected before. It was like losing more pieces of myself, one by one. And ever since the cold winds started blowing in the Vale where I have been hiding from the world, under false name and pretence, under protection of a man who did not wish me well, I started sensing the intent of other beasts, horses, dogs, wolves…. I could not see through their eyes, nor run, nor fly with them, but I could understand some of their wishes. Slowly I discovered I could suggest what they might do. Sometimes they listened to me, and sometimes they did not. The animals are whole, unlike myself. I am a ruin of a lady in unblemished flesh."

"People too?" Daenerys asked with genuine curiosity.

"Only one better than others, and only at brief times," Sansa said, her eyes a pool of blue, tinged with unearthly sadness.

"Your sun and stars," Daenerys said gently. Sansa neither confirmed nor denied the unusual statement, while Brienne was unsuccessfully trying to grasp its meaning. Another understanding dawned on the Lady of Tarth when she finally dared forming a not entirely courteous question of her own.

"Are we… flying back to the capital?"

Lady Sansa's mouth opened only so slightly in apprehension, as she too began to understand. Brienne was tempted to follow her lead in that when the black beast lowered its huge body peacefully on the soft ground, waiting. Presumably for them climb on its powerful back. Brienne only kept calm because she knew that her thick lips could look even less pleasing than usual when her mouth was open.

"Drogon can be cruel," Daenerys said. "But he and I have passed through a great number of adversities. When he hunts on his own, he always returns to me. I trust that he will not harm any of you while we are together. Come!"

When the three of them were up, the Dragon Queen in front, Drogon took the Horn between its paws and prepared to lift flight.

"Oh, I was almost about to forget," Daenerys looked cruelly in the direction of the immobile ugly wight. "Draca…" she began commanding when a dishevelled living woman with two children, a boy and a girl holding hands, ran out of the redwood.

 _She must have seen me coming,_ Brienne thought. _Yet she didn't betray me, nor ran to Lord Euron to tell about us all._

The woman and her children positioned themselves mutely in front of the wight.

"Please, don't," the woman begged. "He was my husband and their father before the ironborn turned him into this. Now he has to obey Lord Euron like the others, but in the things Lord Euron forgets to mention, he remembers us. He helps us when he can in his way, even if he cannot speak. We will die on this march if you scorch him…. Your Grace." The woman seemed to remember with delay the title she had to accord to Lord Euron and address it to Daenerys. Words being the only weapon she possessed to defend her family.

Daenerys paled on sight. The dragon opened and closed his black eyes, blinking, and his Mother was adamant. "Show me that what you say is true or I will have no mercy for any of you!"

The wight could move again. It lowered its axe carefully not to harm the children, it gurgled something to the woman who clung to him, and tried to kiss both of her hands. He gently set her aside then, rumbling deeply in her direction, the sound resembling that of a ship being pushed to the sea over the stones, on one of the more rocky shores of Tarth. The wounded walking corpse advanced slowly and clumsily, axe above its head, towards the eaves of the wood where three women, different like the seasons, were seated on the back of the black dragon. His wife grabbed both of her children, who were already holding tight to one of her legs each. She pressed their faces into her skirts so that they would not see whatever would be coming next. She lost the gift of speech but her eyes were pleading.

"Mother of Dragons," she managed after all. "In the name of your children, please spare the father of mine."

Daenerys paled further and lowered a hand she had unconsciously lifted in the air. Her slender fingers touched a short front-most spike on the neck of her dragon.

Brienne stomach rumbled stronger than the hoarse rasp of the unlucky husband when a pair of great wings spread open, revealing in full their majestic width, taking the three women very vertically to the skies. She gripped a black shiny spike closest to her body, and stared at how the land below them slowly diminished in size.

Flying was not what she imagined it to be, and she needed time to adjust.

**Elder Brother**

The Elder Brother opened his dark clever eyes under a torrent of fresh water. His covered head hurt as if it had not been his own, but rather sewn on his shoulders by an unknown power of old.

The peaceful brown eyes of Mance Rayder stared at him from the foot of the hill where they had all faced Lord Euron Greyjoy on top, and where Sandor Clegane accepted to die to retrieve the Horn. A water skin gaped empty in the wildling's hands. The Elder Brother remembered exchanging words with Lord Euron as if his voice were not his own, just like his head seemed foreign and dazed. He wondered if that was how Lady Arya Stark experienced her rare condition of not being herself. The monk was supposed to join Brienne, but it seemed he fell off his horse instead, losing consciousness. The horse in question grazed peacefully nearby in the company of Patience.

"Are you quite all right?" Mance Rayder asked, masking his worry with his versatile words.

"I seem to be," the Elder Brother said stoically. "If only I could get another head to replace my own!"

Mance Rayder laughed heartily.

"Be careful what you wish for, Elder Brother," he said. "By the old gods, you may yet get your desire."

"Maybe, if I was a skinchanger in those forlorn lands of yours…" the monk retorted coarsely wondering if some of Sandor Clegane's personality had rubbed on him after all during their brotherly coexistence.

"Forlorn?" the singer asked. "If I have a say about it, the forsaken lands of my home will live and prosper to see the new spring. Come, the lady knight is long gone. Her trail is clean of any following and if she doesn't stray she will get to the capital two days before us. After you left, Daenerys's black dragon has come and chased the wights and the ironborn away, with some help from the Golden Company, I must add."

"I see," said the Elder Brother scratching his head. "What do we do now?"

"We ride back with such speed that we can muster," Mance said. "Daenerys should now honour our agreement. And the songs we have been hearing of late planted a doubt in my bones. I mean the song of the mystery bard above all; it has revealed to me that I may still miss some lines of importance for my own play. Lines that could change many things. There is someone I have to see in the capital to remedy that, and he will not be pleased at all to see me again. He may have the knowledge that I seek. Won't you join me?"

"I will, Mance Rayder," the Elder Brother said, headache clearing up and the new sense of purpose sinking in. "If you in return follow me on a visit I have to pay. I do not wish to die by a sword and today I have lost a brother who would have protected me."

The sword of Eddard Stark did not arrive of itself into the hands of Lord Euron Greyjoy and the Elder Brother had a faint idea of who may have sent him such a regal gift. And he would rather not go alone when he went to check his far-fetching assumptions.

"Today?" the singer asked with amusement. "It took me almost two days of riding to find you. In this mild land all hills look the same. It's just that there are no roses growing on the feet of this one."

The monk took a look around realizing the little differences in the landscape from the hill he abandoned only a few hours ago in his feverish mind.

"I see," he said, feeling for bumps on his head, finding a rather large and prominent one on the left side of his face, right above the eyebrow. He carefully felt the skin under his new red head dress and the persistent stubble of grey hair he could no longer get rid off. Apart from the growth getting thicker and more entangled every day, there was no bleeding or sign of further injury. He tied the red scarf back as tight as he could to contain his unwelcome hair, and concluded. "I apologise for my mistake. The fall has affected me more than I thought. For all my recent way of living, I will never be a warrior again, if I have ever been one to start with."

"Don't be tough on yourself," Mance said. "You did better than most. Better than I may have done under the circumstances in Highgarden, if it was me who lived as a priest for 20 years."

A peculiar certainty, which must have been acquired only in a dream, surged in Elder Brother's bruised mind. "Sandor Clegane, did he live? If he did, why is he not with you?"

"He is… suffering from a delay," said Mance Rayder after a long pause to weigh his words within a single sentence. "I trust that he should follow after us when he can."

"Have the dragons helped him in the end, as they helped with the horn?" the monk asked.

"Very much so," Mance said. "Except that his new crystal armour was not crafted to be white but rather black like his horse."

"Oh," the monk said, considering the cryptic words of the wildling. Yet, somehow, the idea sat well with him. His brother in everything but birth would have preferred black as a colour of his armour anyway. _May the Warrior guide his steps,_ Elder Brother thought, _the Warrior and the… Stranger._ It was the first time that the monk unwillingly admitted which of the Seven faces of one god has always protected his adopted brother. The face no one prayed to veiled over the tormented and the outcast. For they too deserved divine benevolence.

To speak of something else, he asked the northerner. "So who are we going to see?"

"Lynn Corbray," Mance said, " he killed Prince Lewyn Martell in the battle of the Trident. Prince Lewyn rode to battle with Rhaegar, side by side."

"He may have heard Prince Rhaegar's last thoughts!" the monk observed with interest and certain melancholy.

"Or not only that," the singer said. "He may have been still alive and seen with his own eyes how the Prince of Dragonstone was defeated and how he fell."

"But why would Ser Lynn Corbray know any of that?"

"Why indeed, I wonder? Because a dirty traitor gloats on its prey when the gods are not looking. Corbray may have enjoyed torturing Lewyn before he died; I wouldn't put anything past the man who was so natural in impersonating the Mad King. Or because Elia's uncle loved the Princess much more than he had ever loved Rhaegar. She was the only reason Dorne came to the Trident in force, as far as the history scrolls in Castle Black were telling," Mance said. "But even if there is a very small chance Corbray might know anything of any interest to my play, I am most eager to hear out what he has to say."

The brown eyes of the King Beyond the Wall glowed dangerously, reminding clearly of all the things that he had been in life, some less savoury than others. His unrefined hands closed convulsively around a small sharp knife, which could be used to gut a fish.

Or to skin a man alive.

"I will go with you gladly, Mance," the Elder Brother agreed.

Unable to determine why his own curiosity to learn what Ser Corbray might confess under a flaying knife all of a sudden almost overtook the eagerness of a blood thirsty wildling.

**Sansa**

_It is not half as uncomfortable as riding a horse_ , Sansa thought in wonder, absorbing the sight of the immaculately white puffy heaps passing above them and the green lands below. The dragon chose to remain under the clouds. Daenerys told them it had to be that way because men, or in their case, women, could not breathe as high up as a dragon could. She, being a blood of the dragon, would be able to stand it for longer, but Sansa and Brienne would not.

 _It has no match in loveliness_ , Sansa thought, in love with flying. And all the while her heart beat faster with another kind of new hope; one she could not yet reshape in words, not even in sensible thoughts.

Their journey was almost too short to be properly enjoyed, in Sansa's opinion: like the last lemoncake on a feast, forced down one's throat in a single bite, not to be left on a plate when all the guests start retiring for the evening. In less than a day the ladies saw the sails and masts of Daenerys's fleet underneath Drogon's belly, surrounded by an army camp which had spread from the decks to the ground.

"My Unsullied," she told them. "They prefer to be on firm land when they can choose. Salty water is for the fish and for the ungodly krakens."

The Queen's hatred for Euron still ran strong, judging by her words. Sansa wondered what the Unsullied were but she didn't dare asking. When they landed, a man who looked sullied, rather than the other way around, welcomed the queen.

"My queen," he said, in a courtesy deeper than required.

"Well met again, Ben," she replied, bantering. "Have you betrayed me again while I was gone?"

"I tried hard not to," he responded in kind, with friendly mischief in his eyes, joyful to behold his queen. "Ser Barristan believed you would return to us with only one lady in tow, and here you are with two! And none of them is who he had told us to expect! Well met, indeed, my queen."

Sansa admired how different their conversation was from what she was used to hear when the kings she had known in the past would speak to their servants.

"How many ladies accompany me is my own choice," the queen said somewhat more cautiously, appearing reluctant to discuss the matter further. "Lady Sansa Stark and Lady Brienne of Tarth will stay here under your protection until Drogon and I bring the Horn to a safer place. I do not dare to have it here in my keeping! Enemy will soon march on King's Landing. I should see Aegon as soon as he returns so that we can jointly prepare our defences."

"It will be done as you say, my queen!" Ben exclaimed. "And Aegon will no doubt come running to you! It only remains to be seen whether he will demand you return Septa Lemore to him to beg her for forgiveness or to carry out her death sentence which he may have, or may have not ordered, and from which Your Grace and Drogon have seen fit to rescue her in your great wisdom and even greater mercy."

Queen's face remained more impassive than a Hound's could be when he was guarding Joffrey, and Sansa understood where the Queen must have gone in the day she was missing from the ranks of Euron's slaves. _But why did she then return? For me?_ Sansa wondered. _Not for you, stupid,_ Arya's voice said in her head. _For the Horn!_ a rasp she hoped to hear again in life laughed at her credulousness in her mind, the only voice that would not spare her from the truth. _She must have been exhausted from flying back and forth in too short a time…_ Whatever her reasons, Sansa had become moderately fond of Daenerys Targaryen, and she was also secretly glad that Septa Lemore did not die.

"We will speak more about all of it when I return," Daenerys told Ben with affection and finality at the same time. "Time is of importance now. Farewell, Ben, my ladies. Enjoy the good autumn weather while it still lasts!"

Ben gestured merrily to the two ladies he was given charge of when the dragon's wings blackened the sky again. Brienne and Sansa found it difficult to follow his lead through the camp, for the ground seemed to be shaking under their feet, blood gone from their legs after a long flight. Sansa admired how her firm muscles softened like cream, and for a moment she believed that the soil itself moved in a steady rhythm of Drogon's huge wings. Uncalled for, a different weakness that had made all of her body feel the same invaded her soul, a memory of a single embrace she would never have imagined possible. Sansa dreamed about being in Sandor's arms again, coveting it more than she had ever wanted to return home when she was still held hostage by the Lannisters. When Petyr took her, that illusion was gone. Sansa grew up in the Vale, and she could accept that her home may have been gone for good.

They were offered a seat on a deck of a large ship Sansa had not seen before. A flat white screen of fabric protected the low table and cushions surrounding it from the autumn sun. The sea water around them was at peace. It was past midday and the air was saturated with sweet smells pleasing to those weary after travel.

"They call me Brown Ben Plumm," Ben introduced himself more fully when they all sat down as Sansa politely nodded. "I command a company of sellswords called the Second Sons, although I was a third child of my parents," he continued. "And hearing your names was most welcome, my ladies, for strange as that might seem I have tidings for both of you."

"Tidings?" Sansa parroted, uncertain of the outcome. News she received from others were rarely of the kind she would have liked to hear.

"Well, for Lady Brienne, there was a raven, from Tarth, from her Lord Father. Addressed to Lady Brienne in service of the good Queen Daenerys Targaryen."

A letter was brought by the servants who must have been spying from the corner on their commander's words. Lady Brienne grasped the parchment, sealed with the sigil of two suns and two moons, on red and on blue, with a large sun in the middle of it all.

"I do not know the sigil, my lady," Ben Plumm commented.

"It is my own," Lady Brienne said opening the missive, "of House Tarth."

Whatever she has read in it, it must have been as devastating as when Sansa had heard about the murder of her mother and eldest brother with most of their bannermen on a wedding feast. Sansa was ready to offer consolation if the tall lady would burst in tears, but her reaction was to be quite different.

She carefully rolled the parchment in a wrinkled knot, squeezing her large palms around it, and then she stood up, more upright than most knights Sansa had seen. "Lord Plumm," she said, in a voice purposefully made even as Sansa's would be when she had to lie to survive. "I suppose there is a place here where a knight can get some training, even if the knight in question is a lady. It would please me greatly to stretch and lose some sweat in order to recover from our journey."

"On a condition that I can accompany you there and that you join us for dinner!" Ben said. "Otherwise the queen may yet feed me to her dragon."

"Thank you, my lord, but your company will not be required," Brienne said with difficulty to stay calm, her countenance stiff and unyielding. "I suppose I could agree to dinner, a late one, if it please you, if that is indeed necessary. My lord, my lady, please do allow me to take my leave now."

Ben stood up to point out to Brienne where she should go. While they were at it, Sansa noticed a board with figures, waiting in the middle of the table, ready next to a jar of water and a few glasses.

"You find it intriguing, my lady? I was just so looking for someone to play a game of cyvasse with me when Her Grace had decided to return," Brown Ben said when they were left alone. "You would not be a player, would you?"

"I have heard of it," Sansa said carefully. "It is popular in Dorne."

"Indeed!" Ben cheered. "That's one thing! I can show you a few tricks. You just order your figures as you wish, for a good start!"

Soon they were very comfortable, hidden from the mighty sun which decided to show its face that day in all of its splendour. Hope she could not name grew, outweighing everything else in Sansa's heart once she was surrounded by sheer beauty.

The board was full of elements she couldn't make any sense of, and the order she made in her own white set of figures was erratic, not drawn by any strategy. When Brown Ben Plum would make a move, she would parry it with one of her own, the same way she would always politely answer her septa. It was mindless and it was proper.

"You do know something of it, my lady!" the sellsword approved of her game, and Sansa continued playing with hopes soaring high in her soul.

An hour passed by before Ben said anything else that triggered Sansa's attention. He spoke with great caution: "Across the sea, where cyvasse is much more popular than here, I have left a friend, a rather short fellow of stature if you understand my meaning."

"Short," Sansa stopped and her breath faltered. The day did not seem so beautiful any longer, and the man in front of her became frightening.

"Ugly fellow, two different eyes, but a big heart."

"Eyes," Sansa repeated.

"A very learned person, and a son of a lord. He is also in service of the queen now."

"Does the queen know his full name?" Sansa tried asking, on the verge of losing her composure, lifting her skirts, and running away.

"Where would the queen be if she knew all her humble servants by their names?" Ben exclaimed. "But she does appreciate him greatly for he has helped her understand her children. The dragons. He read all that there was left to read about them as a child in Casterly Rock…"

Slick stickiness filled Sansa's small clothes, killing all her hopes and raising her fears to unprecedented height. She didn't conceive a child with the man she loved as she had dared to hope for. Worse, she was no longer a maid, and her husband in the eyes of gods and men was alive and serving the new queen.

"This friend of yours, he has a message for me," she ventured, sliding a white trebuchet down the board to hide the trembling of her hands.

"He does," Ben said. "A message or a gift, it depends on how you choose to take it. The queen wanted him to return to Westeros with her. But my friend told Her Grace he had taught her everything he knew of dragons. He beseeched her to be left behind, and help rule her kingdoms over the water while she is away."

"Please, continue," Sansa said, willing her new torment to end.

"The queen inquired why he wanted to stay. And my friend, a giant in his mind, if not in his bones, without whom I would have been dead when I was stupid enough to betray Her Grace, he told her he had to stay to determine where the whores went…"

"Whores…" Sansa stuttered, slickness spreading further between her thighs, cutting its way through her smallclothes. It was only a matter of time before it would soak her dress, refitted many times for all the disguises she had recently worn, to her great shame. "My lord, I do not understand."

"My lady," Ben said, finally getting to the point. "My friend, he was married out of love as a young lad of six and ten."

 _Six and ten?_ Sansa was out of air from shock and from the heat not blocked by the sunscreen. _Tyrion was much older when they married us, he had to be. At least six and twenty!_

The foreign sellsword voice continued slowly and the story he revealed was becoming like one of Mance Rayder's songs, sad, and yet real. "But his father decided to teach him some manners, with the help of his older brother. They told him his young innocent wife was a whore whom they paid to lie to him that she loved him. And then they let a company of soldiers lay with her, and pay her a coin each for her services, my friend being the last one. Being the son of the lord, he was allowed to pay her in gold, where the others used lesser metals…"

"Your friend _killed_ his father," Sansa dared stating, blue eyes wide, dampening from emotion.

"Many years later, he did," Brown Ben Plumm admitted. "But not before he learned that his true _wife_ in the eyes of gods and men may yet live somewhere in Essos. He hasn't stopped searching for her since. That was the message he bid me give to Lady Sansa Stark, if I ever encountered her on this side of water separating our two continents."

"Thank you, my lord," Sansa managed to say, pushing a white dragon two squares forward, towards the only remaining free space in the middle of the board. Brown Ben Plumm rolled his eyes with surprise.

"Have I won?" she asked, looking at the board where suddenly, the white figures appeared dominant, in a new formation they had created playing.

"It would seem so," Ben said. "My friend, he always said you had steel hidden under your beauty and your grief. He remembers you fondly, but no more than that. I hope that you understand."

"As I remember him," Sansa complimented Tyrion, afraid she was going to faint over the cushions, from sudden sharp happiness, or from the strident hurt of disappointment caused by getting her moonblood.

Her marriage could be dissolved if she could prove that Tyrion had already been married, maid or not.

And not having any certainty about Sandor's destiny, she unwillingly carved her reason to live on the fantasy of carrying his child after they had lain together one single time. Her mother told her that was how Robb was conceived when her father had gone to fight in Robert Baratheon's war. It was one of the few things, if not the only one, her mother had told her about the marriage bed in person, so Sansa had always expected that with her it was going to be the same.

Flying on the back of the dragon, she imagined carrying a strong babe under her heart. A son she could not name, because names she willed for her children before, like Eddard or Brandon, would not fit him. Sansa had to think of a different name, one that would contain the immensity of what his father had become for her, delving the way to her heart as a worm would burrow an apple. Sly, he conquered it from the inside where nothing could be seen on the surface. And now she needed him back not to collapse from the hollowness within.

 _Will I ever be able not to dream?_ she thought. And she didn't think she would be. Foolish as it was to have illusions in a world where the strong killed the weak, it was keeping her alive and afloat, which was more than mere food an drink could do. Except when yet another of her dreams would end, crushed like an innocent flower by a boot of a knight.

There would be no child.

Sansa was not a widow like her mother had been, but she understood at that moment how it must have felt to be one, as her sorrow for a man captured in dragonglass ran deeper than any she had previously known.

"Please, my lord," she still managed to keep some of her dignity, "if this game is now over, I would need a moment, and a place to change. The dust from travel lies heavy on me."

"It will be done, my lady," Brown Ben Plumm hastened to obey. "The queen's handmaidens will tend to all your needs."

**Sandor**

Opening the eyes came more difficult than usual when he would be drunk. Stretching limbs was almost impossible.

 _I must have fallen sleep wearing my armour_ , Sandor Clegane thought, and it wouldn't be the first time. On top, it was too warm in the chamber he was in. Forcing his right eye open, he glimpsed a surface of translucent black glass. _Odd,_ he thought, _I do not tend to sleep with flagons…_

Forcing his left eye open, the reality sank in, accompanied by his latest memories. He was lying sideways on the soft grass next to a shiny sword while a familiar heavy one was still hauled over his back. He instantly moved his hands to his line of sight.

They were _whole._

The dragons, just like the bloody Lannisters, seemed to be paying their debts. He lost the use of his hands trying to serve them and it was given back. A much more honest and better payment than when lord Tytos paid for his grandfather's leg with a crumbling keep and an empty title, the Hound considered.

He made an effort to touch his face, giddy with a gale of vain hope, that a dragon could succeed where ointments had failed in the past.

 _That,_ was still the same and the foolish hope immediately faded. He _was_ going to live for the rest of his life with the face Gregor made for him, other miracles notwithstanding. And maybe it was good, because if he didn't have that face he wouldn't have survived touching the Horn, he knew very well. It was almost like one of those foolish things the Elder Brother believed in come true, where the gods have made things to be in a certain way for a purpose.

 _Alive. I'm alive,_ he thought, lungs expanding with every breath he took, grinning like a lackwit.

Unfortunately, healing his hands was not everything the buggering dragon had done. _Black one_ , he could remember it clearly now. _The big brother of the two beasts Euron thought to tame…_ He had to laugh at the absurdity of the dead kraken's ambition.

Attempting to move his legs was an entirely useless endeavour. He was firmly encased in a chest of harsh crystal the likes of which he had never seen. There was no visible way out. He pushed the glass with his hands but it was too hard to break through. He would have drawn his sword against it but he could not reach it in the scabbard over his back. There was barely enough room to move his hands up and down, or tilt his face ever so slightly upwards or down to the soil, smelling on fresh cut grass.

Through his cage he could see the surroundings. The top of the hill was empty, the black ship with the red hull gone, and so was everyone else. He heard a snort coming from behind his back. He would have turned but there was no place. His good mood was somewhat spoiled, but at least he was able to breathe.

 _I am worse than a little bird now,_ he thought, _a giant ugly bird in a cage of its own..._

A cold blade of worry filled his heart faster than water would fill a bucket on a well. _Euron may still have Sansa._ Most likely without any knowledge of the treasure he possessed, but still. Sandor rolled forward with the mass of his body, hoping to crack the buggering glass.

The snort behind him repeated itself, and it was familiar.

He froze in place and listened. A thud, then another. A different movement over the grass than that of his scarred body. The Hound blinked, sharpening his ears to better listen. When he fully opened his eyes again, he saw two pairs of hooves through the darkness of his cage, kicking the ground.

"Stranger!" he exclaimed, tilting his head up. The Horn was no longer there, but a ribbon of dark grey tissue hung at his horse's saddle. Tied as a lady would attach her favour to her knight's sword. There was only one lady in the world who would have done that for him, and grey was the colour of her House. He didn't think Euron Greyjoy would let his horse go free if it was his failed lordship who had caught Stranger, Brienne and Sansa. _They must have somehow met. They must have gone away with the singer and the Elder Brother._ The joy Sandor Clegane felt was so contagious and outgoing that for a moment he hoped it would burst open the grave where he was buried in alive.

Why would a dragon heal him first, and than leave him to die, was beyond the understanding of a mere dog. He rolled forward again, hoping that the mass of his body would do the trick.

Nothing happened except that he nearly cut his wrists open with the steel that used to belong to Ned Stark.

 _Valyrian steel,_ he thought. He has never held a blade made of that noble material. The hilt was close enough to his hand to try it. Sandor Clegane considered he had the entire world to gain if he could break free, and nothing much to lose. The sword was not as heavy as it looked, nowhere as massive as his own trusted blade. He slid the blade of winter ever so slightly over the ground towards the walls of his prison. His grip wasn't firm enough, in a cramped space, clumsy. He cursed himself for a fool. The steel rippled in the colours of the cold and almost rustled with the sound of leaves of the bloody trees people prayed to in the north.

Maybe, it made a ripple in his cage, one too small to be seen.

The Hound applied his considerable force to slide the blade further. There was no place to lift it or to wield it properly, only to push forward.

If his eyes didn't cheat on him, the tip of the sword was out, protruding through the crystals. He nearly broke his right arm twisting it further. He didn't know for how long he laboured, the progress in breaking out as slow as the passing of the ages in the world.

When the sun sank behind the trees, half of the sword was on the outside, vertical to his body, and then he pushed it down with both hands with all the strength he had left in his bones.

The gash in the crystal increased. It took him some more time to enlarge it, but way less than the first opening.

In the deep of the night, the opening was large enough for his head, and hopefully shoulders. He crawled out like an overgrown snake, having no choice but to push the naked blade to a side with his shoulder, cutting it slightly as he did that.

Stranger did something then his horse has never done before. By his large mouth, the animal caught the edge of the man's tunic under the neck, and pulled him further out, so that only his legs remained caged.

Ignoring a pain in his shoulder, the same one where a piece of flesh had been ripped by the White Walker not so long ago, he pressed both elbows in the grass, raising his back to a half seated-position. He pushed himself further back, and in another moment, he was free.

There was only one non soiled piece of fabric he possessed to bandage his latest wound, and no wine to boil. The cut was fresh and clean, so he hoped it would do. He also hoped that Sansa would not mind if the favour he was of a mind to return to her, as she had asked him to do, would not be complete.

Mindlessly, he tore out a long stretch of the bloody sheet he had been carrying under his tunic, wrapped around his waist, and fastened it around his shoulder, as good as it went.

When the cold light of the morning finally dared to show on the horizon, it was fragile, but it did look like daytime, and not a shadow of the world as it ought to be. There was no bleeding to be seen on his arm, so he must have done the job of the Elder Brother well enough.

 _Good,_ the Hound thought simply, pleased by the simplicity of the morning. The dragon paid his debt to him in more than one way, he discovered. _It caged me with the means to free myself if I, in turn, was clever as those beasts seem to be. It protected me from Euron when I was too weak to fight back._

Having loved his horse more than most people love their family, the Hound found it easy to accept the intelligence of dragons.

"Come on, boy," he rasped quietly to the Stranger. "King's Landing is waiting for us."

And if he found a pretty knight in Sansa's bed when he returned, so much the worse. He would gut him and he would take his place, even if she came to her senses about what they had done, as he expected she might. The dog was well trained. He could hold back from what has never been his. But nothing in the world would prevent him from taking back his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who left kudos and commented on the previous chapter. I hope that the new installment might merit your continued attention and kindness :-)


	41. Mighty Trident

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Jaime and Sandor both face trouble, and other characters their past

**Ser Barristan**

The Lord Commander of the Queensguard, Ser Barristan Selmy, missed the return of his queen for accepting to be involved in matters of a different kind. Helping the young was something he felt compelled to do. _If not, what is the meaning of old age?_ he mused.

Obedient servants of the Faith were cleaning up the remnants of the pyre in front of the Mud Gate and with it the half-burned wooden images of the seven faces of one god. The woman they intended to burn entirely to please the gods was safely gone, flown away with the ashes drifting in the salty wind. Ser Barristan had to smile with contentment whenever he remembered the face of the High Septon and of his accomplice, master of coin, when the tide took a turn rather different than the one they had expected. The only thing they succeeded in ruining were the carved figures of the Faith they claimed to protect. _What did that make them?_ Ser Barristan believed he knew the answer, but it would be up to Queen Daenerys to lay her justice upon them, when the time of her reign would finally come.

 _Aegon is a stupid boy,_ he thought, _better at heart than Joffrey, perhaps, but that is the end of it. And it would appear Lord Connington hasn't gotten any less blind to simple truths in life with the passage of the years if he could choose such allies for his king..._ Ser Barristan made the sign of the Seven and blessed the injured gods passing by for granting him the wisdom to see through the game of thrones as good as anyone, and the strength to keep to his honour nevertheless. It was more than many a man could boast he earned from life.

The long stretch of water in front of the old knight was only a dead ending of the Blackwater Bay, neither sea nor a flowing stream, shallow, mostly, its surface flat like oil in the bright light of the morning. Yet when he looked at it for long, under the strong autumn sun the waterfront was large enough to evoke, unavoidably, a very different river, copious, vast, and rich in waters in any of the seasons. A great river flowing now fast, now lazy, opulent and powerful, all the way through the war-violated riverlands.

 _Mighty Trident,_ he thought, _how full of blood have you been on that day of sorrow..._

"Ser Barristan," Gendry interrupted him from his reverie about the past. "Please, help us as you said you would. Mance is not yet back from Highgarden and he has sent no raven. All Daven has is an unfinished parchment with a description of how the battle scene should go. There are no words to it. And I'd rather have this part rehearsed with another opponent than the Hound, for a start. If the difference in strength between my fath... I mean, Lord Robert, and Prince Rhaegar had been such as it is now between me and the Hound, the realm would have known a different fate."

The litter clad in yellow silk rested not far behind the three men on the muddy ground, facing the calm of dark polished water. The four Unsullied who brought it forward on Lord Commander's bidding rested quietly at its sides. From their immobile faces no one could tell if they suspected or not that they had not been carrying their queen.

Ser Daven stood not two steps from the shallowness of the Blackwater, wielding a longsword, a good piece of steel, even if it came somewhat cheap for a Lannister. _Times have changed,_ Ser Barristan thought, seeing that. _The Lannisters of Casterly Rock may yet become the Reynes of Castamere. A once rich and powerful family who will live on only in songs on other houses' victories, sung by their drunk soldiers..._ He purposefully avoided thinking about the fate of the Starks and if he should have, or could have done anything to make it different.

"Did Rhaegar say something to my fath... to Lord Robert Baratheon to provoke him?" Gendry asked. "Or was it only what Baratheon thought Rhaegar did to Lady Lyanna, was that enough to make King Robert prevail?"

"I don't know," Ser Barristan muttered. "I wasn't close enough to hear their conversation if there was any to be had. But I did see them when they finally faced each other in the thick of the battle. I saw them clearly as this lovely morning, first on the bank and then knee deep in the river... In the great Trident they fought! And they were well matched, for a little while. Lord Robert was the broader one, the stronger one between the two of them, but Prince Rhaegar was not behind him in body height and bravery. The warhammer of the stag clashed against the longsword of the dragon!"

"I was lying heavily wounded, maybe ten steps away from the water. Ten steps I could not cross no matter how much I wanted to, unable to defend my prince from his doom or myself from my own... The battle stopped around them and all stood and watched. The day would belong to the winner, we all knew..."

 _Mighty Trident,_ Ser Barristan thought again, and the thought sounded like a prayer to a deity that had not been discovered yet, but who may be able to protect them all from the injustice of the world.

For the new bearers of doom were still following closely in their steps, or rather, in the trail of their oars. The same wind blew in their sails as the one that had brought Queen Daenerys back to Westeros. The richness of the masters of the harpy and the other lords from the Slaver's Bay could not be thwarted and their ways could not be challenged by one victory alone. Many of them still lived. They still had their gold, and they were coming after the woman who defeated them all the way from Meereen, Ser Barristan knew. The queen could avoid thinking about it, but it didn't make the arrival of their foes any less imminent or certain.

"Lord Robert... the future King..." he spoke further about the past. "He took a wound, but then he finally hit Rhaegar straight in the chest. Rubies sprang from his armour! Rubies flew in the air, rubies splattered in the water, rubies mixed with his blood. It was over."

"When Rhaegar fell, the horses of the victor and of the defeated roamed together, abandoned, grazing among corpses, old and new... I was about to become one of them... Only I didn't. And then Robert spared me."

"Later on Robert ordered Rhaegar burned to be certain he would not live... He put a torch to the pyre himself. As it there had been any need for it... I wept for my prince, and than I faithfully served the king who had killed him, for too many long years. It may have been in a battle of equals, but this does little to change the truth. It only served me right when Joffrey dismissed me from the Kingsguard for the weakness of yielding I committed on that sad day by the mighty river. I hope to do better by Rhaegar's sister, if the gods are good, until the age makes my body frail, and my arms falter."

A figure stirred in the litter, behind the thin many-layered curtains hiding her long face, and Gendry gazed towards it, with fervent hope that the terror recalled and retold by Ser Barristan could bring Lady Arya back to life. As always, it was an idle hope. Young Lady Stark was growing and becoming prettier in her restless sleep. Even a man who had seen sixty name days like the Lord Commander could not fail to notice that. But she would not wake.

"Maybe Rhaegar's lost footing in the river," Gendry said to Ser Daven then, attempting to hide his obvious heart's desire to justify his father's actions in the eyes of men. "Let's try that way. I just wonder how I am ever going to be of the same height with the Hound for this scene."

"If I were you, boy," Ser Barristan said, "I would check Septa Lemore's quarters before Lord Baelish empties them, in futile search for a tangible proof of her identity. You will find a most peculiar collection of foreign shoes. Some of them make a woman, or, why not, a man, wearing them, considerably taller."

"I would laugh if your life and deeds have not made you so venerable, Ser Barristan," Ser Daven said."Gendry, do as he says, he seldom gives advice on anything, and if he does, it should be worthwhile!"

"Let's rehearse this first," Gendry said, impatiently.

The young blond man and a strong dark-haired lad attacked each other ferociously, facing the queen's litter. After some minutes of sweating, they waddled in the water and continued. Gendry looked again in the direction of Lady Stark but no sign of life came from the sea of yellow silk. This made Gendry jump in anger, until he hit Ser Daven truly and well, almost ignoring his sincere demand to yield from where he fell in the dark muddy water.

"It's enough, boy," Ser Barristan said, in sudden understanding he had to react. "Injuring a friend will not awaken Lady Stark, I'm afraid."

Slowly, Gendry stopped and rubbed his eyes, as if he had woken from an illusion of his own. He gave Ser Daven his arm to stand up. "I wish my father was noble enough to do the same with Rhaegar," Gendry said quietly.

"Well done, boy!" said a familiar gruff voice, approaching the city gates in a dust of horses' hooves. "Just like I imagined Lord Robert fighting in his overwhelming anger... Never forget how cruelly Aerys murdered Lyanna's father and eldest brother, nor what everyone believed Rhaegar did with Lyanna. The way your father fought honours his memory. He cannot take the blame for what he didn't know."

"Even so," Gendry insisted. "If he let Rhaegar explain... He wouldn't be king then. He would go back to Stormlands. He'd never come to Flea Bottom and I, I... maybe I wouldn't have been born."

"Never regret a gift of life! It is a blessing of the gods, cruel as it may seem to us at times," admonished the Elder Brother, horsed next to the King-beyond-the-Wall, speaking like a man who had felt the truth of his own words. He found some for the singer then. "You haven't thought of any words for this scene, Mance?" the Elder Brother asked of him as they both rode forward to greet the players.

"I have, but they seem futile now. The mystery bard's verses refuse to leave my mind. I may reshape everything after we speak to Corbray," Mance said. "But if you would know, in my wildling dreams, Rhaegar smirked at Robert like his father Aerys would, eyes sparkling with black fire, and than he told the storm lord how dying would not take away from him that he enjoyed Lyanna's sweetness for as long as he could..."

"Our Rhaegar could say such a vile thing with natural ease, when he returns," the Elder Brother considered. "But the real prince may have said something different if he was goading Robert to kill him as you are now prone to believe. He may have spoken, and not only looked like Aerys. He may have said in cold blood how Lady Lyanna begged for her brothers or for Robert to come and help her while he wouldn't stop raping her."

"Have you fought at Trident, too, to think about it so much?" Ser Barristan had to ask of the monk wearing a perfectly odd red headdress, in contrast with his simple brown robes.

"I have," the Elder Brother said mechanically. "I have seen the glimpse of a famous duel from afar as I was drifting in the river which took me to my new home to be, the Quiet Isle. The things you see just in the moment when you are so certain you will die, cannot be easily forgotten. They stay with you forever."

"Indeed," Barristan the Bold had to agree when a raven landed on the queen's litter, the first living one to be seen after the trial by fire of Septa Lemore. Lord Commander hastily picked up the message the bird carried. "With your leave, my lords. The queen is back and she has the horn. I trust that means I will see you for the mummery, if not before."

"Indeed," the Elder Brother mumbled in return.

"Corbray, now," Mance said in a commanding voice. Robert's bastard and Ser Daven followed his lead as if they were the sellswords and he the captain of their small company.

The Elder Brother lingered behind, scratching his head as if he were pondering an answer to a complex riddle. He watched how Ser Barristan, the Unsullied and the litter departed. And then he, too, headed for the city, illuminated by the morning sun, its white walls gleaming like the brightest of jewels in the armour of Aegon the Conqueror.

**Septa Lemore**

Septa Lemore's dream was vivid and nothing like a septa's dream should be.

In it, the man to whom she belonged to, and not the Dragon Queen, saved her from the flames riding a black dragon. He returned for her, over the deadness of the years, and took her away to a cave, with a very small opening to the outside world, somewhere on the top of the mountains. He left her there, while she shivered, in robes tattered from the bite of the fire. Her body was otherwise unharmed. The view from the eagle's nest where she sat showed the smaller peaks below, and the clouds hovering over the valleys even further down, buried in blue haze of the ever growing distance.

Shortly, he returned with furs, hastily gathered, or stolen. The dragon was not far behind him. Although she could not see it, she could only sense the presence of the wild beast.

"It _is_ you," in her dream, she told him, in great wonder, allowing him to step into the cave. She would touch his face and his hair to be certain, but he wouldn't let her, building a nest of furs where only stones and discarded bird feathers have lain before, in the long ages of the world.

"Now," he said, "it is me. But I come and I go, and I cannot hold to a single thing."

"It will come," she said, with care.

"I am so afraid," he said, squatting on the floor, hugging his bony frame.

"Of what?" she inquired, her voice losing its usual shrewdness.

"If I can prevail in this," he said, "I will know everything you may have done in the past. Death is less cruel a thing, I find. Wouldn't you agree?"

Septa Lemore's eyes filled with warm water. "How can you say that?" she asked, not expecting any answer. In her dream, which stopped being beautiful as true dreams should be, she walked away from him and from the blame ringing in his words, turning her world of unyielding hope in nothing but cold ashes. She had not done _anything_ to merit his scorn. Of that, she was certain. There was the tunnel at the far ending of the cave, leading downwards. She had best see where it went.

"Wait, I beg you..." his voice was supplicating for her presence then, and all her forces faltered.

He undressed her slowly in the dimness of the cave, among furs of white, and brown, and grey for their only company. She would have loved it if there was more light but she could settle for semi-darkness, the miracle of feeling his muscles against her nude body more than she ever expected to encounter, even in a dream.

Decisively, she pushed him away. She rose on her tiny feet, and forced him to lay down instead.

It was just light enough for her to discern the lines on his face, and to know it was him. Him... She finally dreamt about the right man, there was no doubt left. She kissed him and he tried to pull her down again, but she wouldn't follow, tugging at his clothing to place it out of the way. She could not wait. She would not wait to wake, empty-handed, frozen, alone. The time for tenderness would come later, and the years of longing called to be quenched first.

It was unbelievable.

Better than she could remember it when she was not asleep, and when she had seen a much lesser number of her name days. All muscles in her body started aching from the movement she was no longer used to. He explored her body, and she let him do, frantic in her own joy, confirming and reconfirming who he was and that they were together again, in her dream, at least, against the will of the gods, old or new, or even those from across the water. _There are far too many gods in this world_ , she found, and she didn't want any of them. She only wanted one man, who had returned to her, through the trial of times.

He sat up swiftly before he would lose control, as he would often have done, and she was too far gone to protest. They remained flushed against each other. He was dwarfing her and it was more than she could take. Opening her eyes wide, she looked up at him with all the love she bore him, before letting her head fall backwards.

In abandon, she sobbed.

A draft came from somewhere, from the mouth of the cave, perhaps. Septa Lemore opened her eyes for real, all drowsiness gone from her stiff limbs. It was Daenerys standing in front of her, and her dragon was peering in from the outside, too large to enter. They were the ones paying her a visit, in an abandoned shelter of the birds of prey high up in the Mountains of the Moon, not the man she had just dreamed about, no matter how real it felt. _My real saviours,_ she recognised them, and she was grateful. She was not surprised when Drogon's claw-adorned leg pierced the stale air of the cave, only to leave the petrified horn of the dragonlords in the custody of one of its darker corners.

"Drogon," septa told the dragon, caressing its scaled limb before the animal retrieved it. The dragonlady just watched their exchange, enthralled, long silver hair slithering down her slender back.

"He has become fond of you after only one flight," Daenerys Stormborn observed, cautiously, as if she had wanted to ask for something more, but she didn't know how to put it in words.

"And I of him," Lemore said slowly. Not understanding what was expected from her, she couldn't offer anything more forthcoming in a guise of an answer. Hiding secrets belonging to others and to herself had become Septa Lemore's second nature with the implacable passage of time.

"Do you lack for anything?" the Targaryen lady asked.

"No," was the only answer from a bewildered septa in her bed of furs.

"It is understandable," Daenerys concluded, and she was not entirely wrong. "Meeting Drogon can be overwhelming, I know that best of all. Do you desire anything we can still provide?"

Septa Lemore realised there had already been some food placed in the corner where the horn ended, too. There were also dried branches in a small hastily built hearth. Drogon pushed his head in the cave, obeying an unspoken order of his mistress. He breathed, and the fire crackled in an instant, bringing life to places that have been made lifeless by the gods.

"No, thank you," Lemore declined at first. "There is, maybe, one thing," she remembered. "When the mummery is played, if you will allow that to pass, I wish to be there, and watch. Can you give me that?"

"It will be as you asked," Daenerys agreed, still curious, but relenting for the time being. "Drogon will return for you on time."

"Thank you," Septa Lemore said, with sharp honesty. "Fly well, daughter and sister of dragons! Do not tarry here talking to an old woman who has nearly lost her mind."

The dragonlady and her steed were soon gone, fast disappearing in the empty vastness of the sky. Septa Lemore wrapped herself in a thick grey fur. She sat at the mouth of the cave, and looked out, reliving the sensations from her dream.

An eagle, or a mountain falcon, cried in the distance, fast in approaching. There was no snow yet, but the air smelled of winter.

Her skin tingled madly, and her being bent forward in anticipation.

**Jaime**

The horses were almost saddled as Ser Jaime Lannister was about to leave Tarth.

 _For good, mayhaps,_ he thought, not regretting leaving the beauty of the island behind. He only wondered how much time it would take him to reach the capital, first by ship, and than by endless riding. And if, when he would finally come to King's Landing, Brienne would still be there. Or if he would find Ser Hyle Hunt in her maiden bed. _You won't, you idiot,_ the voice of consciousness he normally didn't possess shouted at him in the dampness of his mind. _It's the last thing she would do._ But the worm of jealousy was strong, digging tunnels within his mortal soul with ferocity larger than it had ever manifested when Jaime loved Cersei. He didn't know why but he had turned a thousand times more jealous man since the seasons have changed. Or since his kidnapping by the white dragon. _Viserion_. Or since he loved Brienne more than anything. _A weakling, that's what you have become_ , said the judging voice of Lord Tywin, his father, but Jaime didn't care.

Lord Selwyn stood at the castle gates to see him off, just like a proper lord should treat his son-in-law to be. Two knights from Tarth would accompany Jaime, to bring gifts for Selwyn's daughter. Wishing to mount a horse, a modest grey one, and not the hateful white one reminding him inexorably of the long list of his failures, Jaime found he could not move his leg.

An invisible presence he didn't sense during his short stay in Tarth, nailed his lithe muscles firmly to the ground.

 _Hey!_ he exclaimed inwardly, afraid of folly. Yes, he did wish to see the white dragon again. Selfishly, he thought that flying back _home_ must prove much faster. But the dragon was gone to wherever the dragons went to after it dropped Jaime in the water. And now its malicious influence was back and would not let Jaime mount a horse. _Seven hells,_ he cursed, and the presence was offended, he could feel it _hurting._

"My lord?" Lord Tarth asked, noticing Jaime's discomfort.

"It's nothing," Jaime denied the sensation, and applied all the force of his will to lift his leg. The complete absence of any possibility of movement outmatched the arrogance of his haughty reply to Lord Selwyin by far.

Jaime looked up to the empty sky. Before he would roar loudly with frustration, a familiar scaled entity suggested he should see Lord Tarth's treasury in confused images, rather than clear words.

"My lord," Jaime tried, not seeing what else he could do. "One last thing. It may not seem proper, but I would love to look at Lady Brienne's inheritance, not because her dowry would be in any way important to a Lord of Casterly Rock, but to honour her inheritance before I take my leave."

"Naturally, my lord," Lord Selwyn acquiesced, and Jaime was glad that the older man did not take to calling him son. It made it easier to pretend he did not abuse his hospitality by a hastily pronounced proposal in Brienne's absence. _And I so wanted to ask her properly… Will I ever do anything as it should be done?_ he wondered.

His already fragile mood sank further when he established there was nothing worth seeing in the treasury where Lord Selwyn had promptly taken him, beaming from happiness to show him around. A shield, such as Brienne had worn, a falling star on a sunset field. Some jewels, some textiles, nothing of interest or of value.

The clawing presence landed heavily on his mind, suffocating him, somewhere from the outer side of a single open window to the ancestral treasury of the House Tarth. _What do you want from here?_ Jaime asked, and stared at his surroundings.

There, in the far back, on a blue cushion, behind the shield with the sigil of Ser Duncan the Tall, there was a dark coloured stone. Jaime's mind started _burning_ white and gold in the moment he first laid his green eyes on it. As a man bound by an evil spell, he went to it and picked it up in his hand. It was way heavier than it appeared, and quite warm to his touch. He needed the support of his body to hold it properly.

"Thief," Lord Selwyn hissed behind him all of a sudden. When Jaime turned around, still holding the stone, Brienne's otherwise peace-loving father met him with naked steel in his hands and madness in his eyes. Faster than a snake, the old man snatched Jaime's left arm before his son-in-law could make any move to defend himself. The stone was left cradled between Jaime's stump and his body, and his left hand ended up pressed to the cushion where the stone used to be.

"As if someone like _you_ could ever love anyone, and much less my unfortunate, honourable, honest daughter! I was a fool to believe you! You came here an adventurer, to steal my only true treasure! To please the whore of your sister, or to increase the glory of your own house! As if you were in need any more gold, when you can shit it all over the westerlands!" Lord Selwyn was clearly beyond himself.

The blade mounted towards the ceiling and Jaime knew that in the next fleeting moment he would be crippled further, when the sword would land on his left wrist. Even so, he was compelled to hold to the stone he was about to steal, rather than drop it and fight his way out. _What will someone chop off next?_ he wondered briefly about his fate. _My legs? My cock?_

Jaime had very little time to think of words that would save him from Brienne's father wrath. A white snout appeared in the window, and all he managed to utter was an agonising, "Look!"

The thunder in his voice dazzled the older man who turned around, sword still in mid-air.

In the window, there was a head of a white dragon, his eyes mild, as though he were a calm riding horse, and not a fire-spitting monster.

"Oh," Lord Selwyn said, "I see."

Jaime had no idea what his father-in-law-to-be had seen, but at least he carefully lowered the sword, put it back in the scabbard, and bent his head piously half way to the ground. "My lord," he said, "please, find it in your heart to forgive me. I had not known..."

The newly found humility puzzled Jaime even more than the old knight's previous aggression. _Known what?_ He wanted to ask but such language would be unseemly from a son of a great house and a future son-in-law to a man bowing to him as if he had been the son of kings.

"All is well," Jaime said instead. "Lord Tarth, please rise. If it meets with your approval, I would like to take this stone to Lady Brienne instead of your other gifts."

"Naturally, naturally," the old lord fought to find his words. "You do not love her, you do not have to pretend any longer. I understand everything now..."

 _Understand what?_ Jaime wanted to scream harder than when a blade cut his sword hand. Instead, he said with utmost dignity, "You are wrong about that. Every single word I said regarding my feelings towards your daughter was pure truth. I mean to be faithful to her, and honour her above all other women."

Lord Selwyn slowly rose to his full height, throwing confused glances now to Jaime, and now to the dragon. "Oh…well," he muttered, "if that is indeed so, why not telling me all of it then? Why hide the whole reason of your visit from me? I could have harmed you for no reason at all."

Jaime tried another unlikely, unadorned truth to see if it would help. "I had no idea what was in your treasury. Viserion suggested I should look before we left."

"Viserion," Lord Selwyn said in awe, half bowing to the dragon. "A noble name, no doubt."

Jaime couldn't stand the senile droppings of the old man any longer. If he stayed another minute in Tarth, he would offend him seriously and he couldn't do it, because crazy or not, the man facing him was still Brienne's father. On the inside, Jaime whispered: _Would you take me to King's Landing, Viserion?_ Immediately, his mind was filled with white glitter and ease, which he took as a yes.

And so it was that Ser Jaime Lannister walked out again through the ancient gates of Evenfall Hall, past the prepared horses and armoured knights. The white dragon landed on an empty space not far from the sea, lowering its elongated head, so that the golden-haired knight of an obsolete Kingsguard could mount, using one of its broadened shoulders as a ladder.

"Give Brienne my love," Lord Selwyn said after him, hurrying to catch up with the long impatient strides of his son-in-law to be. Jaime could only smile politely and grip the dragon's neck, not to loose himself, or the stone he was carrying, when the beast finally took flight.

 _It's not so bad,_ Jaime concluded, when they were high up in the air, and he was conscious, for a change, on the dragon's back. The guilt crept up again, telling him he was not _worthy_ of riding a dragon either, the man who pushed a sword in the back of a dragon king, with good reason or not. _The Kingslayer._ But the crystal white presence engulfed him, and from that moment on, all he could experience when flying, was bliss.

**Sandor**

Sandor Clegane never thought it would be easy.

Yet having lived where he should not have done so, he expected it to be a little less difficult. Stranger and the Hound skirted Euron's dead army with ease, jumping over bracken, travelling at night, a dark man on a black horse. They avoided the roseroad entirely. He was certain he could creep all the way to Daenerys' fleet from the side of the sea. Once there, he would surrender to her guards, and hope that Sansa, or the Kingslayer's woman and the cursed horn, or at least a raven, have brought tidings from Highgarden to the Dragon Queen of what he had done.

Instead he discovered there was another large body of foreign ships sailing slowly towards King's Landing. A long trail of soldiers, crawling like a many-legged insect through the fields, followed its slow progression on the firm ground. The wind was weak, and the newcomers would need at least two days to reach their destination, and the last ships in the fleet of Daenerys Stormborn, already anchored in the Blackwater Bay.

For the Hound, it meant that the way was closed. He could not pass around, or through the intruders' ranks without being seen. The land was getting barren within the sight of King's Landing, offering no shelter. He sat still in the last grove of miserable trees before he would be forced to move in the open. The banners of the army flew high, displaying the sigils he had never seen in Westeros; the ugliest one being the woman-beast with pointed teeth, scorpion stings and ugly bird wings, mimicking the greatness of the wings of a dragon.

He had to think of something. Or he could try his luck on the roseroad side and risk filling the ranks of Euron's wights.

A life stirred in the forest behind him, an animal, maybe. He could not risk it being a guard or a scout, so he stood still, and when it could be heard again, the Hound jumped at the source, holding his would-be attacker mercilessly to the ground strewn with thorns.

Long blond hair, lighter than the yellow of the fire, spilled from the head he was holding. Behind them both, another noise came, a weak hand making the dry branches crack, a sound like a squirrel running fast up the tree. He looked the woman he was holding in the eyes. They were so dark blue that with a different hair-colour they would appear brown, so very different than the bright blue wells of foolish hope Sansa had where mere eyes should have been. A spear was in the woman's hands, its pointed tip inches away from his non armoured shoulder, smeared in something stinky. The dog's sense of smell was sharp and it rarely failed him. The Hound's features hardened as he snarled. "Poison, is it? Who are you? One of these new beasts marching down there in the open?"

The woman shook her head, denying his assumptions. The squirrel must have run behind them, and soon it was going to come forward, the Hound suspected. He secured the woman with one of his giant arms, and used the other to throw the poisoned spear away, to a safe distance.

 _Wait,_ he thought, _that was what Prince Oberyn used to finish off Gregor in the Imp's trial by combat before all the rest has come to pass._ He studied the woman with his keen grey eyes. _Older than Sansa, but still a few name days short on me._

"Who are you?" he exclaimed, almost too loud, for they could be overheard. Her eyes pleaded him to be silent and turned towards that other squeaking beep, filled with a worried expression of some emotion the Hound could not recognise or place.

Close to them, under the last trees of the kingswood, there was no squirrel to be found.

A very young boy child staggered out of the bushes, barely able to walk on his two feet. He made a step, then a second one, and then he crawled on all fours straight to the woman the Hound captured. The woman whose skin was entirely too amber-coloured to match the innocence of her hair, and whose eyes would have poisoned him gladly, if they could.

"I will let you go if you don't scream," he said. "No point in alerting the brave men out there to our presence." He hoped that the stern glimmer in her eyes meant an agreement as he slowly released her from his iron grip. The child climbed in the woman's lap and babbled with pleasure.

"I, too, need to pass," she announced. "First I thought you were one of them. But you are worse than them. You are an animal like your brother was."

"What do you know about my brother? Or about me?" the Hound asked. "I've never seen you in my life, woman."

"Haven't you?" she challenged him with scorn in her dark eyes, as she cradled the boy in a protective embrace. A dagger shone in her hand, and she must have been waiting for him to do something, try and rape her, or something. The Hound would laugh at her stupidity if time wasn't of essence, and if he didn't want to avoid the experience of being stabbed in the back while trying to break through the lines of the enemy soldiers. He had to find a way for them to work together, at least until they were behind the walls of King's Landing.

"Wait," he had a crazy thought, gaining size with every moment. "Aren't you the one who sewed a holy head to my brother's corpse as a gift to Mance Rayder? The pious septa held in highest esteem by the High Septon when he so kindly thought of letting Gregor kill my brother in all but blood, the Elder One. Or rather, a sand snake in septa's skin."

The women raised her head in defiance, waiting for him to strike her with his sword, knife at ready. His words have hit the target, and the Hound knew it.

"I would have never thought of such a thing myself in all the years when I desired to kill Gregor," Sandor Clegane said, in earnest, pondering his lost vengeance. He had travelled day and night from the Reach, forgetting that Gregor Clegane ever existed. He nearly pushed Stranger over his limits, _to see Sansa, to touch Sansa, to ask her what she meant when she came to him..._ So it was only then, in the gloom of the last grove of the kingswood that the Hound wondered for the first time where Gregor's headless corpse had gone from Highgarden and if they would ever meet again. "But I can tell you that it was fitting that he be humiliated so, after a life of what he did to others..."

The woman who used to dress like a septa eyed him warily, studying him for lies. Her determination faltered for a lonely inch.

"I'll give you one thing," he told her, continuing his attack in words by more devious means. "To ensnare me as you almost did, you were well trained in stealth. I tell you, woman, no one wants to pass through this army as much as I do. Best believe that. If you can temporarily set aside your tender feelings towards my brother, and me, we are sharing a common goal."

"I'm listening," she said.

"On one condition," he said, "you walk in front with the brat so that I can always see your back, and not the other way around."

Others would take the dog before he'd let anyone best him, not when his nostrils could almost smell the lovely scent of the only thing worth tracking in his lonely life.

"You play Prince Rhaegar in Mance Rayder's play," the woman stated with no emotion.

"What does that have to do with anything?" the Hound wondered.

"It is just that," the woman swallowed, uncertain how to express her next thought, "a sister of mine lives as a maester apprentice in the Citadel and I... I sent her a raven to learn if she met a man there, not a lover, no, an ugly man that goes by the name of fat crow. This fat crow, he was a brother of the Night's Watch in the north, and he knows Mance Rayder better than most. So he told Sarella, my sister, what I should look for to p... to please him. So I rode far into the Reach, further than Highgarden, and I retrieved a treasure of the King-beyond-the-Wall very few people know about."

"That man cares only for his songs and to fight off the Others from his lands," the Hound said. "And for nothing else."

"You couldn't be more wrong," the blond woman said, hugging the child tightly. "Will you help me find him? If you do, your back will be safe from the sand snakes, for all your days, and it is not a small thing to promise to a brother of the monster who _murdered_ our father, and his only sister before him."

Her initial sneer was back, and Sandor Clegane was quite fed up for being judged by his name and face.

"The House Martell is founded on the blood of the innocents just like any other house in Westeros, great or small," he launched a challenge her way. "And pray, what kind of frivolity have you arranged for the buggering Northman in the Reach? A ribbon of flowers to tie around his cock so that it does not shrivel from the cold when he returns to the frozen desert of his home?"

Tyenne Sand pushed the face of the child forward, not showing any sign of being repulsed by the Hound's lack of kindness.

The dog watched as the child stuttered. "Knee...ler. Big knee...ler," the boy said. And looked him square in the eye: a feat that few grown men and women could achieve at first sight without flinching.

"No," Sandor Clegane said, denying the obvious.

"Yes," Tyene Sand confirmed what the Hound refused to believe. "This is a son of the ruler chosen by the people of the far north, as much as I am Oberyn's daughter. I am bringing Mance Rayder his only son and heir."

The silence between them was long and heavy, interrupted only by the quiet murmur of the leaves.

"I don't suppose you swim much in Dorne?" the Hound spat out, rapidly. _There is this one thing we could try,_ he thought.

The woman's face sank, and it was clear they did not _._ The Hound was forced to consider how his return to King's Landing became even more troublesome than it was before.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sansa's next part did not fit in this chapter for which I am truly sorry. Coming next as soon as time and imagination allow.  
> Thank you to everyone who left a kudos and commented. Thank you for reading.


	42. Walk With Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Aegon hits the bottom of his misery, some characters are tortured and some reunite

**Daenerys**

Daenerys' tummy felt tender for hours after flying back to King's Landing from the Mountains of the Moon. She couldn't stand steadily on her two feet. The distances she covered with Drogon since her return to Westeros have all been joined in her mind, into one blue expanse where Drogon and she were reigning alone, with no need for great noble alliances or smallfolk alike. Yet that was so only when she would allow them to stay in the air. And the life of the queen on the soil of her homeland was full of possibilities, most of them to fail. And so it was that Daenerys did not know how to deal with the Lady Stark's plea.

"I can do it, Your Grace," Lady Sansa offered, again, stepping firmly in front of Brown Ben Plumm before he could speak, and probably volunteer by force to do what had to be done, not to disappoint a queen he once betrayed.

"How can you be so certain?" Daenerys had to object. The auburn-haired northern beauty seemed more fragile and sensitive than Daenerys had ever been, even when she was thirteen, and a maiden sold in marriage to a huge horse-loving barbarian. Dany's brother Viserys took good care of his sister's soul when they were still children; her innocence disappeared for good when the red door of the only house she felt safe in had closed behind her.

"I know how to be a prisoner," Lady Sansa said with honesty. "I believe I can appear to be one of Lord Greyjoy's slaves, since he even knows me now to be one, and I still have the adequate dress in my possession. Then I can listen to his conversations with the red priest and report to you with advice on how best to negotiate with his lordship. I will try to use my... sensitivity of the north... The Iron Islands are not so far from Winterfell, and Lord Euron's nephew was my father's ward," she said. Sansa was referring to her condition of a _warg,_ gone awry in her case, unwilling to admit what she thought to be in front of all Dany's commanders and councillors. "With my experience, I may be able to sense the truth of Lord Euron's beliefs. Let me try, please, Your Grace. Before you turn to fire as a weapon!"

The Queen from Across the Water wondered why Lady Sansa objected to the use of fire, although she was already half-convinced with her heartfelt argument. _A very different woman, yet as strong as her sleeping sister. And a much more convincing spy than Brown Ben Plumm, danger notwithstanding..._

Dany loved her husband and her sellsword lover, and she was no stranger to a pleasure a woman could take from another woman when a moment allowed. Her relationship with Drogon was not a simple one to define in purely human terms. Daenerys was the blood of the dragon. Sometimes she believed that if she could have laid a dragon egg to continue the race of marvellous beasts, savage or not, she might have done so. She had known sadness, and sorrow beyond measure, and she had faced betrayal in matters of the heart.

Yet she had never known true suffering in all her love affairs, and sometimes her thoughts roamed imagining a love so desperate that she could die of it, or for it.

A peculiar consideration occurred to her then, before the Lady Sansa's determination. _What would it be like to meet a young man from the House Stark? Would I love him as fiercely as my older brother must have loved the woman he died for?_ She wished Rhaegar was alive so that she could ask him directly.

One thing she would not be able to stand if she ever visited the seat of the House Stark: the cold weather. Having grown up in Essos and after passing through the desert there to reach the sea, even the autumn in the capital of Westeros was unpleasantly cold. Her flight over the surroundings of Harrenhal raised her awareness about the change of seasons. The evil with blue eyes walked on Westeros after thousands of years when it was asleep. She had seen them in the woods, the beings named Others or white walkers in scrolls so old that no one believed them to be right about anything. Yet the creatures from the legend strolled over parts of the Seven Kingdoms, asserting their existence.

"I will allow it," Dany said, not masking her disgust, burning black in her soul whenever she remembered the one-eyed lord from some islands far away. "But if you are not back in a day, Drogon will burn part of the wights' army and hopefully the kraken leader too."

"Euron _stole_ my dragons. I will have no mercy for him and his kind," Daenerys solemnly announced further. "Just like I will have none for the knight of the Kingsguard who _murdered_ my father by stabbing him in the back even if he had thought to become a septon in the meantime!" she swore nervously.

The unease of the blond lady knight who delivered the horn did not escape Daenerys, aged by ruling in her youth. Then Sansa's soft voice was heard again, and the queen was bound to listen.

"I will be back, Your Grace," she said, arranging a fake slave collar around her neck with natural elegance, as if it were a long fashionable ribbon or a loose lace on an elaborate gown. "So far, I have been able to survive all my gaolers with some honour. I will pray to the gods that it remains that way."

**Aegon**

Aegon knelt in front of his aunt, for the first time experiencing a sensation akin to hopelessness. His silver hair swept the ground, a precious cover on the colourless mud. The king's diary he recorded as a chronicle of his rule for posterity had been abused as an active order of the king, no less but to order an execution of a woman he loved as a mother. A woman who together with Jon Connington taught him everything. He would be less than nothing without the two of them. And he could not even blame Jon, or Lord Baelish, for that chain of events. He could only blame his own stupidity for the words he had written in haste before the last conversation he shared with his adoptive mother. And what he had written could indeed have been read as the king's wish or order in the matter, once when he was gone.

Robert Arryn pleaded with him that he was _wrong_ about his guilt regarding Septa Lemore's destiny, before Aegon left the Red Keep. The Young Griff wouldn't listen. Aegon was responsible, there was no doubt left, and Daenerys _had_ to let him see his septa. And very soon at that!

His aunt looked taller then she was, standing in front of her flagship with black dragon seated next to her in place of any other guard or weapon.

"My lords," Daenerys Stormborn said coldly, every inch a queen, making Aegon feel less like a king than ever before. "What good news do you bring from the Reach? Have you defeated the mighty foe from the Iron Islands? Have you conquered the horn of the dragonlords?"

Her words were full of mocking, and every single one pierced Aegon's heart.

"Princess Daenerys, my aunt, I beg you," he started. "I thank you for saving Septa Lemore from an unjust sentence I would have stopped myself had I been able to return on time. My councillors thought to act in the best manner with me gone to war, but they were not able to understand my counsel, a rambling of a boy too young to rule, entrusted to a mere a piece of parchment. I thank you, and I beg you, princess, for there is no doubt you are one by birth, I supplicate you to let me speak to Septa Lemore. My heart will not be able to find rest until I have done so."

"There is still a small matter of the missing lady, Lady Sansa Stark," Lord Baelish said when Aegon was exhausted from talking. "Septa Lemore may be able to provide a clarification about her whereabouts. Even if it is now established that she had not killed her, for the dagger found in her quarters was of an unusual design for Westeros, I dare say, and it contained no trace of _fresh_ blood when either the maesters or the alchemists examined it."

Drogon lifted his head and gazed at Aegon's master of coin with one black, wary eye, as if he wanted to ask why the maesters and the alchemists did not study the weapon before the septa was put to death. A puff of smoke came through his smooth nostrils.

"Drogon tells you," Daenerys explained, her words polite but cruel, "not to speak of what you know nothing of. I would heed to Drogon's counsel better than you have been able to follow that of your own _king._ Especially regarding a person Drogon, not I, has chosen to save. Dragons rarely do a thing without reason, I have found, since I have become their mother."

"Please, princess," Aegon humiliated himself further. "A word is all I ask!"

"And a word is one thing more than you deserve!" Daenerys laid down her judgement, still like a statue, and stern. "If you were the blood of my blood as you claim, if you were the blood of the dragon, you and I would now plan the defence of this city, soon to be besieged not by one army, but by two. Which you would know if you have sent out scouts, as you did in Highgarden. Instead, you have been wailing in the mud of your heart! It took you two days to gather your courage, and come and see me. Or maybe you listened to the wisdom of your councillors one more time, I know not. Either way, Aegon, begone. When you think you are man enough, one who can leave with his failures and his mistakes, return to me and we will talk of strategy, and nothing more. Septa Lemore's words are her own. She is not my prisoner. She is not _anybody's_ prisoner and she will talk to any of you when and if she so desires of her own free will."

Aegon was speechless when Jon Connington removed his helm and threw himself to the ground in front of Daenerys, red pointy hair covering the beginnings of his old freckled face.

The Young Griff, Aegon, thought how Jon's hair had looked better when it was blue and when he still styled himself Old Griff. Things were simpler then. Septa Lemore would tease Jon about one thing or another in their turbulent past, and they would both tell him old stories and songs from Westeros, of Jenny of Oldstones and her Prince of Dragonstone. Aegon was very young and did not like the end of the story.  Prince Duncan renounced being an heir to the Iron Throne. He became the Prince of Dragonflies and stayed with Lady Jenny until his untimely death in Summerhall.

But Aegon still thought that Jenny was the most beautiful of all names.

Unwillingly, he had seen himself as the prince from the song. The Prince of Dragonstone like Duncan, at first, and like his father Rhaegar before him.

"In the name of Rhaegar, my king and my friend, your brother," Jon said, "I beg of you, as his sister, do not abandon his only son in this hour of peril. The kingdoms are rebelling, and the second foe has followed you from over the high seas. Forgive me if I dare to call you as I was allowed to call Rhaegar, in his great goodness and mercy. It is your duty, Daenerys, to stand against the masters of the Slaver's Bay and their forces before they do more harm to this land than our own wars and winter combined."

"Wise people who have known my brother say that his nobility was his undoing, my lord of the griffins," Daenerys said quietly. "Shall I make it mine too, to please you and his memory?"

Jon remained on the ground, utterly defeated, and Lord Baelish ignored Drogon's counsel as one haunted by demons of the Old Valyria. Aegon wondered for the first time what was the personal gain of the master of coin when he insisted Aegon should marry Sansa or keep her as a ward of the crown. "But... the Lady S..."

His words were stopped by the burning of a line in grass in front of his elongated feet. The Lord of Harrenhal made a tentative step back.

"Her ladyship is my _guest_ now," Danerys said. "And I can ensure you she is being treated gently. Should you have any difficulties to accept this, you should take them with Drogon."

 _So she took her as a prisoner now_ , Aegon thought bitterly, _and then she has a cheek to talk of justice and of manliness._

Aegon turned around, deeply disappointed in the ways of the world. He was taught to rule and to respect, but the land he was destined to be a head of did not live by those teachings. He didn't even bother to see if Jon and Baelish were following behind.

There was only one person he could see to relieve the tension threatening to wrap his soul in the ever growing darkness, thicker than the Long Night was said to be. Her name was not Jenny, but Aegon found it was equally beautiful.

"Jeyne!" he told her with a genuine smile, when he discovered her seated on the lowest step under the Iron Throne.

She didn't make a sound. Her hood was down as always. Her beautiful black hair was falling all the way to her knees, shiny and alive. _It has grown tremendously since she had saved my life in the Riverlands,_ Aegon thought with love in his heart, recognizing the emotion for what it was only in the depth of his despair.

"Jeyne," he whispered, "I cannot go on any longer not knowing your face. I cannot go on without knowing that you love me as I love you since the first day we met."

The familiar female figure turned away from him, hiding the cloak of her hair, as well as the purple fabric of the mantle she wore from his sight, leaving only black velvet surface covering her back in front of his weary eyes.

"Jeyne," he prayed, "you have been hiding yourself from me and I have let you. Please, let me see now that I have not been wrong. Let me see that you do have affection for me. Please."

The gurgle that came from the opening in her cloak on the front side he could not see oddly resembled crying. Quiet sobbing of a child, and not of a woman grown.

"Jeyne," he had to say again. "Have I been so wrong about you? Tell me that and I will leave you be. I will not disturb you by any unwanted attention. I swear by the old gods and the new."

His oath made her screech like a wounded bird, bending over herself. The sound was carried through the hollow halls of the Red Keep until her sister, Willow, had heard the call, and joined them.

Aegon wanted them to be alone, but he guessed that in that, too, he would respect Jeyne's wishes.

"Your Grace," Willow bowed gracefully. The time she spent in court and with young Lord Arryn has made her a true little lady in the making and not only the innkeep's daughter. "My lady sister required my presence. Do I have your permission to stay?"

"Yes. Please," Aegon said. "I will bow to the wishes of your lady sister in everything."

"It may be that you will soon change your mind," Willow said looking at the skull of Balerion the Black Dread on the side of the throne room. Thirty man had to drag the litter specially made to transport it back to the Iron Throne from the bowels of the Red Keep, where the Usurper had banished it.

"Oh, I could not," Aegon said. "Never!"

"Willow," he called to Jeyne's sister. The truth was in the air, and it made no matter if one more person knew it. "I have come to love your sister from very close. My love may be my undoing as it was my father's but I will never abandon it."

Quiet cries continued from under the Iron Throne. Willow approached her sister. Gently, she sat next to her and helped her turn around. Empty hood opening which hid her face, and the waterfall of hair returned to observe Aegon one more time, exhaling fear and uncertainty as he had never seen in Jeyne, a woman who was always calm determination and the shadow of doom protecting his inexperienced steps.

"My lady sister regrets not being able to return your affection in a ways you may have imagined she would, Your Grace," Willow chose every word with care.

Two bony hands dived out from the pit of Jeyne's prison made of velvet, and with the slightest of movements lowered her hood backwards.

A face he never expected to see in his Jeyne stared at Aegon between loose strands of hair, the only living and beautiful thing on her body. Jeyne's ruined voice broke further in her throat, marked by the blue of hanging, when she tried to say something in person to her king, but no words came. Only an ugly rattling sound.

Aegon was speechless again, for the second time that day. His eyes roamed the figure he imagined so many times, mysterious and beautiful like Jenny of Oldstones, his dreams making him blind to the truth so many of his guards, councillors and soldiers must have known all the time.

"Have you not known?" Willow asked with pain in her voice.

"I may have, somewhere deep inside," Aegon admitted. "But I chose not to know for love was growing in my heart. Misplaced, as my father's before me, but love nonetheless. Please, my lady, Jeyne, what is it that you said to me now in person? Now that you have finally showed me your face, beautiful in death as it must have been in life. I am so sorry for finding you so late!"

His Jeyne put a skeletal finger on her lips and croaked another sound, holding her sister with her other arm for support.

"My sister," Willow started explaining, and Aegon thought that the dead skulls of the dragons smiled at him for the first time since he inhabited the Red Keep. As if they had expectations of him, too.

"My sister," Willow repeated, "she thought herself fancying a boy who cared for another, a lady, where she was an innkeep. She died defending that boy, and he gave her a gift of life such as she has now in return, for he could not reciprocate her affection, or rather, affliction for him. When she met you in the woods of the Riverlands, near our home, she thought she had seen an image of the gods from seven heavens. She would have offered you herself if she still could. She cried, for she can still cry as you have heard, regretting dying, regretting not being a woman any longer. She regretted her death, yet she cherished her new existence. For as much as it pained her, not being able to give herself to you, it was only her new condition that made it possible for her to save you. And she will go on doing that until the day she too is burned like when the dragon destroyed the evil creature Gregor Clegane was made to be. She only asks you for the kindness to be allowed to continue in your steps, and for your mercy that she is to walk covered. For she would be unable to stand the sneers of others at what she has become. She bid me never to tell you this, not in her new life, not in her final death. But now she has released me from the oath I took. You know all now, Your Grace. What say you, asks Jeyne?"

Aegon smiled a genuine smile at the corpse he was facing. He approached Jeyne and took both of her cold hands in her own, making her rise on her well hidden feet.

"My lady," he told her, staring in earnest straight in her dead dark eyes. "You will walk with me, not after me. And I will be both the happiest and the most miserable king the Seven Kingdoms have known. Happy to have you at my side, and miserable for not being able to have you as a man that I have become despite that some still see me and treat me as a boy. We will walk in Westeros together and try to do good in the time that we still have. And with your permission, you will follow me tomorrow when I see my aunt as a man, not as a wailing boy."

With utmost tenderness, Aegon raised Jeyne's hood back to the way she had always carried it, never parting his purple eyes from the dread he now knew, and still cherished. He felt that his father spoke to him from his grave, and he knew that as strange as it might seem he would never love another woman in his life. Worse, he would never marry another woman even if he became the one and only rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms, and all folk demanded him to have an heir.

Luckily, he was far away from imposing his claim. Aegon breathed in relief when he exited the throne room. Jeyne followed behind him and her continued presence was a blessing calming ointment in the open wound that would never heal.

Like so many rulers before him, Aegon was doomed.

He would never be able to hold the woman he loved, despite that she returned his feelings.

**Sansa**

Sansa moved in slow elaborate motion next to the mother of two children whose husband Daenerys spared. They were throwing flower petals under the feet of Lord Euron Greyjoy and his priest as they walked to meet the envoy of the great masters of the Slaver's Bay, who proposed them an alliance between the ironborn and the outlanders to defeat the Targaryen Queen. Lord Euron did not spare Sansa another look and all her efforts to consciously understand how he truly felt were met with no success. _Because he is not Sandor Clegane, and I have no love for him,_ Sansa thought, angry that her mythical skill of the north only made it possible for her to understand the mood of almost any animal. It was infinitely more difficult with men.

At least her natural ability to hide her own thoughts increased tenfold with the arrival of winter, and her newly gained comprehension of animals. She could easily hide from the Targaryen Queen, and the scrutiny of her dragon, the most important part of the reason why she wanted to spy on Lord Euron. where there were stronger and more suited candidates. Lord Willas Tyrell didn't follow his Lord Father in declaring the allegiance of their House to Aegon. Instead he sent a raven to Daenerys Stormborn, announcing in detail the deeds of the former Lannister Hound in favour of House Targaryen. The missive gave credit to Sandor Clegane's selfless courage no one could predict or expect in someone renowned as a brother of the Mountain, and uglier than seven hells put together. Willas mentioned how first they retrieved the fallen hero's shield from the grass. It was left behind after Euron's ship departed in the midst of black smoke. And two days after, the hero himself was gone, traces of hooves visible among the shards of his black crystal burial place.

It meant that Sandor Clegane could very well sit hidden in Euron's army, or follow shortly behind. And no fire, dragon or man made was going to burn him if Sansa was having a say. _You can burn on my chest,_ she thought. The wish was ridiculous and it created a longing that could never be fully set aside or forgotten, ever since she came to his room in Highgarden.

The foreign lord approached Euron from afar. They met at an empty space between the two armies, one mostly dead, and the other breathing. Although Sansa suspected that the men chained at the oars of the newcomers' ship did not feel much like living beings, after being forced to row across the seas dividing Westeros from Essos. Their bony hands, that could be seen through the holes on the hulls of the foreign ships, long and lean, looked more dead than alive to Sansa.

"We get the queen, and you get the dragons," the foreigner bargained immediately.

"No," Euron refused. "My price of our cooperation is the queen. When she gives in and I make her my wife, I will have dragons too. Then you can have two dragons out of three."

"I will have to discuss it further with my masters," the foreigner said in a silky tone. _Lying_ , Sansa knew, which left Lord Euron's offer on the table as sincere.

"It is my final offer," Euron said seriously, not even looking for any approval. "I make my own decisions and I have no master to consult."

"I will give you my answer tomorrow at dusk," the foreigner said. His semi-agreement made Euron smile and add. "Don't make it any later than that. Or I will join the Targaryen side on the condition that she accepts willingly to be my lady wife.

Sansa threw fists of rose petals high up in the air with joy, eager to go back to Daenerys and report she had one entire day to make Euron change his mind. Her walk through the camp of the dead showed no trace of the Hound or his horse. Wherever he was, it was not there. Crawling back and away from the ranks of the dead, in an attempt to return, took her too close to the waterfront. And there, far, sailing behind the new fleet, _there_ was a small river island, or a pile of _driftwood._ Sansa could not swim, or not very well. If she could, she would have swam towards it, believing firmly for a moment her _lover_ had to be there, either badly hurt or otherwise unconscious. The island moved, deserted, with no trace of human presence. Sansa stared in the distance, when the slave mother of two children saw her. The good woman motioned her to go back and follow their master as a proper slave should. Sansa shook her head in rejection.

The same rejection she received when she offered to free the slave woman, and she would have had none of it. "I will not abandon my husband or my children. There has to be another way."

Sansa hoped the woman was right for she was leaving and she would not be coming back.

In the presence of Princess Daenerys, Lady Stark said timidly. "Your... Grace. I believe the following. If you mask your revulsion and treat with Lord Euron in person, you could make him agree to anything you want. You could sign a marriage agreement or a truce. Or have Drogon kill him if you must. Then maybe his army would sway to you as an invincible shield against your other enemies."

The Queen smiled and Sansa's thoughts wandered to Sandor again. She wondered where he was, and if he was returning to her as she had asked of him or not.

 _Maybe he rode West, might be he rode home..._ she thought and the pain of that assumption was almost too much to bear. _Come back to me, my love,_ she called him mutely. _Without you, there will be no more songs._ She knew he would despise her thoughts for silly but they stayed on her mind nevertheless. The island she had seen still drifted behind the enemy fleet, lagging far behind. She had to wonder if it could have been a disguise of a kind and why the Hound used it if it were truly him, and not just another runaway slave.

Daenerys commanded her servants to send out the ravens, and the city heralds to drum and flute, reading her decision.

A pardon was offered to every lord in Westeros who would come to King's Landing and bend a knee to the Targaryen rule. To all except Ser Jaime Lannister the Kingslayer. _Even to the Freys,_ Sansa thought bitterly. _Even to Lord Greyjoy, the dragon-stealer._

High lords and ladies were summoned not only to bend a knee but to witness a mummery announced as a play about the history of the House Targaryen. Sansa admired the queen, and her determination to prevail. She wished she had a bit of that, and not only the tremendous will to survive.

"Shouldn't you look for the northern singer now," the queen asked her with kindness. "I wish to know where he will perform his play, to have the heralds drum the summons all over the city and in the surroundings, as far as they can go before facing winter."

Sansa ran to do as she was bid, proud of the results of her spying mission, almost forgetting she was again somebody else's ward. _Maybe I am not that different than Arya,_ she thought, _maybe I can truly be brave like my father, and his older brother and his father who were murdered by the Mad King. But Daenerys will not serve any justice for them, she will only take justice for her own losses._

 _All the kings and queens are the same, there are no better or worse ones,_ Sansa thought as she scurried to the city gates to find Mance Rayder, too tired to think about the Hound and his real kisses, which tasted a thousand times sweeter than the one she never received, the one she made out sensing his confused desires, on the night when it occurred to him to save her, and she refused his help. Then he left, not taking anything from her. And by doing that he had won her heart, he had touched her soul, he had sealed his fate and hers in a way much more certain than if he had made her his for real.

Then, wishing to dream, she imagined his face with no scars, and she regretted it immediately. Next, she pictured the good side of his face, two grey eyes staring at her own, with scars half visible from the frightening side. Her heart gained speed, like a bird's heart could do.

 _Come back, my love,_ she called him again. _I am weary of walking on my own._

**Mance**

They found Lyn Corbray in one of Baelish's brothels. He was in a bed made of green silk with two boys, who looked used to such trade, and not very much mistreated, at least. The Elder Brother looked away, and Mance took to himself to send the boys out.

"You will have other customers," he told them, and the power of suggestion in his voice was luckily enough.

"What?" Lyn had the guts to protest when the wildling hands closed around his neck, with the normally peace-loving monk staring coldly in the background. Almost _approving_ of such unholy action.

"Nothing," Mance said. "I am merely helping you to remember Prince Lewyn Martell and the battle of the Trident in more light."

Ser Corbray turned greener than the lavish sheet under his naked arse and the Elder Brother exclaimed in disbelief. "He does know something! I wasn't quite ready to believe it until now..."

"Of course he does," the wildling agreed. Mance sat on Corbray's chest as a king would on his throne. He drew out the flaying knife with one hand, and grabbed the man's cock with the other. "You have heard the story of what I have endured and done at Winterfell, haven't you?"

"I didn't know about it, I swear! I was only a knight, not a lord! A lowly soldier" Ser Corbray screamed. "Please, don't!"

"What was it that you did not know?" the Elder Brother asked a question as if he were the King's Hand, and Mance the King's Justice, ready to act if the Lord Hand was displeased. "What did Prince Lewyn Martell do?"

"He... he... he did the bidding of the Mad King to protect Princess Elia, but he never told me what it was I swear!"

The knife ventured next to the soft skin of his even softer cock, and the screams of fear could be heard all the way to the seven heavens, if they existed above Westeros as the faithful believed. "No, please!"

"Why not?" Mance asked. "The boys can stick it in your behind as you may prefer, and you have gold enough from Lord Baelish to pay for it."

"I am a man, not an ox," Ser Corbray complained. "I would rather die a man." The Elder Brother looked away again, seemingly unable either to approve of the wildling's actions or to stop him, enthralled with the cruelty of the ways used to uncover one more of the many faces of the truth.

"If you were younger, they could train you as one of the Unsullied. This way..." Mance pondered out loud. "The best you can hope for is that the septons take you, isn't it so, Elder Brother?"

When he said that, he noticed how the eyes of the knight he threatened narrowed, and wandered to the door through which the two boys he paid off got out.

"I see," Mance said menacingly, the madness in his voice more purposefully real. "Maybe you will talk if I buy the services of the boy you released. Which one is it? Do you know what I could do to him if we were alone in the room? We wildlings bed wild beasts and then slaughter them for our pleasure. Did you not know?"

It was difficult for Mance to keep a crazy expression on his face as he spoke. It belonged to the long dead Varamyr Sixskins and it would frighten most people Mance knew. It was getting even harder to ignore the outrage on the face of the monk who followed him in good faith and probably only understood at that moment what he, Mance, was capable of doing.

"Please!" Corbray shouted, and the King-beyond-the-Wall sighed inwardly, not letting show the turmoil he felt. _It worked. He is changing his way of singing. Not such an animal after all if he pities the boy more than himself._ It was of utmost importance to know what happened to Rhaegar in the very last days of his life, or as much as it could be known. And as much as Lord Reed knew about the passing of Lady Lyanna, he was not at the Trident, and knew nothing about how or why the Prince of Dragonstone met his end.

"I finished off Martell when he was wounded but I haven't asked to hear any of it!" Corbray continued, even unasked for. Mance kept gazing at the door and fingering his knife. _It is still working._

"What did he say?" the Elder Brother bellowed in a voice that the wildling king would never expect from him, filled with desire for knowledge. _So the men who wrote the scrolls I devoured at Castle Black must have been like him,_ Mance thought, hiding his wry amusement. _Most wildlings kill for food, or sport, and he, the holy septon, he would kill or allow murder for knowledge, despite all his goodness and his faith._

Corbray continued without any need for further questions, as a broken man. "He bid me not to tell! He cursed me to lose my eye sight if I ever told anyone. Never cross a Dornishman, my lords, haven't you heard that saying? Or his curse will find you in your grave..."

"What was it?" the Elder Brother asked with more calm, taking Mance's role of the King's Justice for a moment, baring the tip of his lance.

"He was in fever. He said how he, Lewyn Martell of Dorne, did to Rhaegar, in Aerys's service, the same what Aerys had asked a which, a Maegy, to do to Cersei Lannister, Tywin's daughter, to get to Tywin by hurting his sons. Aerys was quite mad, you know. He saw an enemy in everyone. Martell blabbered it was all for the best and to protect Elia's honour and happiness... And the gods should forgive him, he thought... What was a life of a woman compared to the peace in Seven Kingdoms..."

Mance purposefully made a step towards the door, releasing the sword loving knight.

"Wait!" Corbray said. "I think, I think Martell lied to Rhaegar about something important, as this Maegy lied to Lady Lannister. To make them do something Aerys wanted, or to harm them. Aerys hated Rhaegar towards the end more than he hated Tywin. He thought that his oldest son was plotting to steal his throne. I have no idea what Martell must have told Rhaegar to make his hand falter. He fought Robert Baratheon with courage, but even men on our side noticed he rode to the battle carrying a sword..."

"Isn't that what you kneelers normally carry?" Mance asked.

"Prince Rhaegar's weapon of choice was a lance," the Elder Brother said with certainty. "Not a sword."

"Right," Corbray agreed.

"Others take me," Mance cursed, "I was right. And so was the mystery bard. Rhaegar rode to the battle of Trident, not to win, but to die."

"You were," the Elder Brother agreed.

"Corbray," Mance said to the unmanned man shaking among dark green silks provided by the courtesy of Lord Baelish. "Take a counsel from a wildling if you would. Buy or steal that boy you truly want from Littlefinger, and not only his services for the night. Winter is coming, and you may lose him to a foe more cruel than myself, and than die of regrets like Rhaegar may have done."

The King-beyond-the-Wall let himself out of the room, out of the whorehouse and into the streets still bathing in the greyness of the evening, slowly giving way to a peaceful night. The siege was not yet visible, and the honest citizens rested. The Elder Brother followed closely.

"Would you have hurt him, truly?" the monk asked.

"Whom?" Mance asked.

"Ser Lyn. Or the boy, if you prefer to answer that."

"Ser Lyn, yes. The boy... I wish to think that I would not be able, but in truth, I do not know."

"A fair answer," the Elder Brother muttered. After a pause, he went on, about a different matter. "I only wonder where we could find Cersei Lannister before the mummery. It would be interesting to hear her out as well."

"Our path may yet cross hers if the gods are good," the wildling said to the stars slowly rising on the sky above. "But I have now enough hints to go on with my own songs."

**Brienne**

Brienne gazed at the Blackwater after a morning of exchanging blows with the Second Sons on the training grounds of the Dragon Queen. The pain in her muscles could not chase away from her head the terrible sentence Daenerys had spoken: there would be no mercy for her father's murderer even if he had good reasons to kill the Mad King...

It was for the best if Jaime never returned to King's Landing.

She pondered sending a raven to her father with a request to keep her _betrothed_ as an honoured guest until such time the queen would grant her leave to go home and celebrate her marriage. It would all be a lie, but that was all she came to expect from men, Jaime included. She tried hard to ignore the sincerity of his statements in Highgarden, and forced herself to think he was no better than Ronnet Connigton, mocking her, mocking her father, to pass his time...

Two days with the Second Sons brought a heap of rude thoughts to her mind. "A cunt is a cunt", the men frequently spoke. Brienne could have accepted to be just _that,_ and a poor substitute for Jaime's beautiful sister. If only he told her the blunt truth, as he had always done, and not that he came to her with stories of her supposed beauty and his love. Mocking her father with proposals of marriage firmly wrapped her thoughts around Jaime's insincerity and dishonour.

Septa Roelle laughed happily at Brienne from her grave. So cheerfully that she almost did not notice the bubbling of the water some thirty feet in front of her where a heavy body hit the gleaming surface, breaking it in lucid drops of white and blue. There was a flurry of white and golden scales in the air above the restlessness of the sea. Brienne stood up and put a hand above her eyes, to see better in the direction of the merciless autumn sun, as she would do on the beach of Tarth, waiting for a ship to call to her father's small port.

 _It could not be..._ Her cheated heart faltered and she glanced around for a helm she had borrowed. It belonged to the Second Sons, but it would do. It had to be done fast. Before a tangle of blond curls would approach the shore of the sea, or the bank of the river, no one knew at that point of Blackwater Bay or Rush where she was stranded. She skilfully stripped off her armour and ventured into the water to above the waist length, pretending to freshen after heavy exercise. She sprinkled her face, glowing red, with cold water, and in the other hand she secured her helm. When the swimming head closed on her, Brienne made another leap forward, and slammed the helm on it, harder than she would have wanted. Then again, wasn't it what Jaime deserved for making a fool out of her all over again?

Angry, she sneaked her now free arm around his neck and dragged him through the water, away from the fleet and towards the unmanned city gates. He didn't resist, accepting his punishment. He must have been exhausted from a longer swim than most men could undertake, and she didn't even wonder how he ended up in water, or in Tarth, or what the dragon may have done to him. She only rejoiced in being stronger, in having power over him, to drag him out of harm's way first, and scorn him later as he deserved.

"My father sent a raven," she told him between her crooked teeth, unaware that her more than half wet body in tight garments, flushed face and plastered white blond hair truly made her look more beautiful in the sun than Septa Roelle could ever have dreamed of, or even foreseen in the seven heavens where she must have gone.

"A Maiden... with the body of the Warrior," a half-choked voice said under the helm. "And here I was, hoping for a warmer welcome." Brienne had to force the helm's opening down so that she wouldn't meet the mocking green of his eyes. They would be beautiful under the sun, as handsome as the rest of him was, and all her decision would falter if she looked at him, Brienne knew beyond doubt. She would accept to be his wife, or his whore, whatever he would ask of her. As long as she could keep him safe from the Dragon Queen.

He was wet and wearing clothes with her sigil, an endearing sight to her suspicious eyes. The next thing he did was as dishonourable as one could expect from the Kinglslayer. One of his legs, weightless under the water, pushed into hers, making her stagger on her feet just enough to loose a firm grip on his neck. He straightened up as a proper lion would and groped her waist firmly, his helmed head coming just a little bit under the crown of hers, when they stood next to each other. They were _almost_ of the same height, and the little advantage she had over him in that regard had always only made his advances bolder. The wetness of the upper part of his body soaked the only still dry parts of hers around her broad shoulders.

"Wench," Jaime whispered, and Brienne's legs were about to lose gravity. "You can keep convincing yourself how much you hate me. Yet I think we should find a septon and some cloaks before I do to you what I did to my sister in Casterly Rock when we stopped being children. And when I do that, you can either let me, or kill me yourself, for I will not go back."

The improper proposal only made Brienne's blood, stirred by training, twirl further in her veins. _So this is blood lust,_ she lied to herself, knowing it had been much more than that, and already for a very long while. Her body delved further into his, reviving the revelations from the dungeons of the Red Keep, the stolen glances and knightly gestures they exchanged in the timid nights filled with reticence in Highgarden, when the battle had kept them all awake and their senses alert.

"Please, Brienne," he pronounced her name and she was defeated. "Let me do this one single thing as it should be done in my honour-lacking life."

They walked to the city gates together. The sun warmed them, shining into their backs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has left a comment or a kudos so far, especially on the previous chapter. Updates come slowly now, as the story starts its still somewhat lengthy journey towards the end.


	43. The Colours of the House Lannister

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Jaime and Brienne get married and the other characters start swimming, in literal and metaphoric ways.

**Elder Brother**

The Elder Brother walked with purpose in front of Mance Rayder all the way from the Street of Silk to the Great Sept of Baelor with his heart on his palm, or in his heels. Not in the place where it was supposed to be at any rate.

It was the first time he ventured there after his meeting with the High Septon when he had been named the champion of the Faith later on. The Hall of Lamps was the same when they entered, but the Elder Brother was not. There was new fire burning in his soul, and the war was making of him something else entirely. Something, or someone, he could not understand quite yet.

His old friend from the riverlands, elevated to the highest duty of the Faith, knelt in humble vigil on his bare bony knees, just in front of the Father's altar, as the proper High Holiness should do. Three unknown septas intoned a pious chant behind him, calling for the Father to judge his most faithful servant justly. The Elder Brother missed the septa who patched him when he fought Gregor Clegane's body and whom the dragon has taken away.

Be as it may, his business was not with any septa, nor with the Seven, nor with his friend.

The Elder Brother came to see the High Septon, the highest authority of the Faith. Mance Rayder guarded his back because his brother in all but birth was missing after he faced the works of evil magic from across the sea, freeing the dragons from an ancient curse of the old Valyria that bound them to a highborn man who was not their lord.

The simple monk walked forward and addressed the high emissary of the Faith with unfeigned humility.

"Your Holiness," he said with respect, bowing to the ground. But he didn't kiss the High Septon's hand nor his robes, nor had he made any attempt to do so.

The gnarled old man stood up from his prayer and faced the Elder Brother as an image of piety and devotion. Only his hands twisted with unpleasantness his face would not show, but a monk who was changing could still see.

"Elder Brother," the High Septon also acknowledged the fellow acolyte of the Seven, and not his friend. "I suppose you have come to ask for my leave to return to the Quiet Isle."

The Elder Brother thought how sad it was when companionships ended, yet it happened under the sun. His friendship with the former ordinary septon lasted long enough, and it was something to be grateful for to the gods. "That may have been my intention before the siege of Highgarden," he said. "But now I have dared to come and see you about a different matter."

"Than speak your mind and begone," His Holiness said. "I have duties to attend in the court of King Aegon."

"Would such important duties entail sentencing more helpless women to death? Perhaps children?" Mance Rayder observed, assuming the role and the ruthless tongue of Sandor Clegane, gone, a sore in the Elder Brother's aged heart. The wildling king stopped talking when the monk gave him a peculiar look. The gaze of the dark eyes spoke more than any words could have said. _This is my battle,_ it told him, and the King-beyond-the-Wall listened. The sept was luminous and empty, apart from the group gathered at the Father's altar, a true house of the gods, waiting for the faithful to remember it existed. _They might soon enough, in time of siege,_ the Elder Brother thought, not judging the people for their cowardice in war. It was in human nature to know fear, to face it, and to overcome it.

"That is not for the lower servants of the Faith, nor for the enemies of the realm whose life is forfeit, to know about," the High Septon replied with monotonous serenity as if he were reciting a hymn. "The Seven illuminate my path as they will never shed light on yours."

"And for that my soul is glad," the Elder Brother said with unexpected coldness of a man who captured a red scarf from the red priest's head by force. "I have come to ask a favour from you. It is only in your power to grant it."

"In my great mercy I will allow you to speak, in the name of our earlier friendship, and I will not call my sparrows upon you," His Holiness said, lighting two more candles to the Father with deliberately lengthy gestures.

The chant of the septas stopped, the tension between two men of the Faith grew, burning hotter and brighter than all the candles in the sept. The wildling king watched attentively, ready to strike in need.

"Call whom you must," the Elder Brother leaned on his bastard lance, head wrapped in red, not baring it as he bared his feet in the company of the Seven as the custom prescribed, to respect the innocence of the septas. "Yet I will ask this of you and you _will_ grant it. In two days the mummery written by a _man,_ Mance Rayder, enemy of the realm or not, shall be played on the top of the stairs leading to the Great Sept of Baelor. The only place in this town where the highborn and the smallfolk will have enough space to stand around and watch. No armed sparrow or Warrior's Son or any other servant of yours will hinder this."

The High Septon laughed, abandoning the propriety of his function for a time. "And what makes you think I would concede a favour like the one you wish for?" Regaining his composure, he added, "It would be an offence to the Seven to allow it."

"Would it?" the Elder Brother continued with calm, his eyes sharper than that of a mountain hawk. "Then I should immediately seek audience with His Grace, King Aegon, and his aunt Princess Daenerys Stormborn. They may be keen to know how Ice, the ancient Valyrian steel sword of the House Stark, last time rightfully owned by Lord Eddard Stark before his imprisonment and sentencing to death, has been reforged in King's Landing. Most likely some time after it had been found by the sparrows where it was forgotten, in the caves of the old gods in the riverlands. It must have been recovered in a shape of two different blades, shining in red and gold of the House Lannister, which were initially robbed from their owners by the Brotherhood Without Banners, when this renowned company of brave men stripped two of its highborn prisoners of most of their garments and of all of their dignity..."

The Elder Brother paused and continued with indifference. "Ice, reforged by Master Tobho Mott in the capital, whose work does not come cheap, was then sent as a royal gift of welcome to Lord Euron Greyjoy, who has been seen marching to the capital, leading a great army. Only one person in the realm had the power to command all this. Shall I tell you his name?"

The posture of the High Septon did not waver. "I suppose you may delay your audience or skip it altogether if I provide the stage for the horseshit this barbarian has written rhymes about..."

"It pleases me greatly that we understand each other again, at least in this," the Elder Brother finished, undisturbed. The insult passed through him like foul air, not reaching his soul.

"I suppose I will then tolerate this blasphemy, for the time being," the High Septon added with danger in his voice. "But I tell you this, _friend._ Any rightful king or queen will need my blessing, or the kingdoms will rebel. Such is the will of the Seven. And when that comes to pass, I will still remember how you forced my hand. Your pyre of a traitor of the Faith shall rise even higher to the skies than the one where Septa Lemore exhaled her last breath before Princess Daenerys took her dead body away, mocking the justice of the gods."

The Elder Brother turned his back to leave, ignoring the last words of His Holiness. Mance Rayder guarded his back from the holy speech as if it were a rare poison, and not mere air smoking from the High Septon's mouth, in the freshness of the new season.

"We will be back as a company of mummers in two days," the Elder Brother said, not looking back. His words sounded like a command of one used to be obeyed, not as courtesies of the contrite brother who was leading the community of the Quiet Isle not by strength but by the force of reason. The colour of his voice resembled a clash of iron blades on a fine summer morning. "And if later on the rightful ruler of the Seven Kingdoms passes the sentence that I should burn, I will climb on my pyre gladly, and look you in the eye as the fire consumes me. For you have never been a friend of mine. It was only I who was grievously mistaken about the will of the Seven in that, and perchance in many other things. Only time will tell. Farewell, Your Holiness, until we chance to meet again. May the Crone guide your steps, and may the Mother have mercy on you. For you may find no kindness in the world of men, just as you have given none."

"What was that?" Mance Rayder asked the monk when they were at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the great sept. The air of King's Landing smelled less stale and more of freedom down there, the Elder Brother thought.

"What?" he asked back, scratching his head in obvious discomfort.

"You threatened him and you have made a dangerous enemy," Mance said. "Yet I have to thank you for arranging the best possible stage for my play such as I could never dream to have. Why?"

"On the first part, it is just that I saw on his face and in his twisting old hands how it was all true," the Elder Brother said in his usual tone of a peace loving monk. "All the blackest explanations that have been haunting me when we rode back to the capital. He had Ice robbed for his designs and he is immersed with both feet in the game of thrones. Something irreparably broke inside me, and I could speak as one of them. As one of those who are playing the game. It must be the misery of winter, and of war. I am turning into a man that I am not acquainted with, yet he lives and breathes in my own head and in my own skin."

"Now you are you again," Mance said. "In your shoes, or on your bare feet to tell you truly, I wouldn't worry too much. Living men change, like the fields, like the moon, corpses don't. Besides, you are a healer. Can't you help yourself it your condition irks you? Do you know anyone else who suffers from it?"

"I do," the Elder Brother thought of an unconscious girl, growing up to be the lady in her sleep, for whose welfare he cared greatly, even if he had seen her only once in his relatively long life. "It was for our growing companionship, but also for her, that I arranged this stage for the show. It is said if you once witness an atrocity, another profoundly emotional experience in the same place could call things you are unable to remember, or to understand, back to surface. It should help you heal. But the lady I have in mind can talk about her condition even less than I can for hers is more severe. Besides her, and perhaps me, there isn't anyone else."

The two men dragged their long thin legs, one pair with flaying marks, and one pair whole, back to the good fisherfolk. It was time to find Ser Daven and Blackwood, Gendry and Corbray, Ser Hyle Hunt and brother Benjen, Lady Brienne and Ser Jaime. And finally the Lady Sansa and the Hound if they could. It was past time to find someone to read the very short role of Ser Jaime Lannister in the show. It was past time to gather all the players. The mummers' show would soon begin in earnest, for better or for worse. The Elder Brother's heart jumped with unknown hope as he wondered what would be the final words in the play of the role he had been reading.

The last lines of Lord Eddard Stark.

The last man who had seen Lady Lyanna in life and brought her bones back to Winterfell to the crypt of the old Kings of Winter.

 _A Queen of Winter she would be,_ the Elder Brother thought, _if her body did not rest forever under the cold stone._

Stepping up his pace, he hurried to catch up with the singer, who was gesturing vividly towards someone, approaching them from the end of the street.

At least two players whom they hadn't seen since Highgarden have been finally found.

**Sandor**

"We have to leave the horses behind," the Hound told the Sand Snake regretting that inevitable choice before he finished the sentence. He hadn't left Stranger on his own in long years he had the horse, not even when he was dying against the tree in the riverlands. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that the horse did not leave him on that occasion, but the Hound was not the man for subtleties.

The Sand Snake did not think so much about it or about the horse she brought, a fast, but rather insignificant animal. She just nodded to the necessity, her blond hair tied up messily with a strip of brown leather, as she continued working on a raft with precision the Hound saw women could apply to needlework, when he still guarded Cersei. They were making a small craft, designed to look like a drifting heap of wood and grass on one side, a common sight on the Blackwater Bay, ever since the wildfire destruction unleashed by the Imp on Stannis Baratheon's fleet polluted the waters bathing the capital of the Seven Kingdoms with the remnants of ships for many turns of the seasons to come.

"You will not be able to swim that long," she stated with the characteristic lack of faith he found amusing. It would appear that the Dornish did not have great confidence in gods, only in themselves, an attitude that suited Sandor Clegane very well, despite the increasing odds to become a victim of a murder if he was not vigilant enough.

"You can always swim for yourself," he retorted gruffly and the woman had the grace to blush. Or whatever passed for it on her amber-coloured face. "Or continue forward on horse and see where it will get you and the boy you are dragging. I for one will not go down as a slave. I am done with serving."

So it was settled.

The boy was throwing dry grass on the raft, enjoying their labour as if it were a game, and their island an elaborate toy. He didn't speak, or cry that much, which made things easier, the Hound thought, wondering how anyone could willingly have children, seeing the world for what it was. _The little bird would want them, wouldn't she?_ he thought. Involuntarily, he shivered. _As if she would want me to be the father._ Yet the image of another man of handsome blank face siring her children brought forward such rage that it would consume him, ruining any chance they had of success. He sat to chop wood instead, as once he chopped bodies for Tywin Lannister, or dug graves under the auspices of the Elder Brother. The Valyrian steel sword which could cut through dragonglass just as easily, proved worthy of the ignoble work of a carpenter, which was only good, for they had no axe, or any other tool.

 _I have to see Sansa,_ he intoned a hymn of his own. _I have to go to Sansa and see if she will have me. For now, at least._ All other needs and portents of doom abandoned him as his limbs worked hard to build the means which would take him back to her.

Towards the evening, it was time to depart. The weather was mild, the wind present, but beyond quiet. Sandor Clegane hoped it would stay that way. It would be a two nights swim to the capital, moving at night and resting during the day. _If nothing went wrong,_ he thought, almost expecting it should. Between him and the snake they pushed the raft in the water. The boy was already in the middle, hidden in the bed of grass, with all their weapons and most of their clothes. The Sand Snake chose to wear only an odd bodice of brown leather, barely covering her modesty, arms and legs bare. _She can most likely move better in that than in those towers of fabric women are made to wear,_ was the only thing the Hound thought about it, approving of anything that helped in bringing him closer to Sansa. Tyene stepped on the craft bravely, with only a brief gaze of fear towards the treacherous dark blue of the water. Only when the Hound was satisfied she was well on it, surrounded and _tamed_ by the sea, forced not to try anything stupid lest she drowns, he stripped entirely and tossed her the rest of his clothing. He would need it to dry better during the day, in order to keep his strength.

He put one foot in the water, and the warmth of it met with his approval. It was better than in Lannisport in summer, for they were further in the south. Swimming would make it appear warmer still, he knew. _I will come and see you, Sansa,_ he thought. _As you have come to see me in Highgarden. It is as if the gods you believe in are guiding me now._

Waking up from his thoughts, he didn't miss the woman's look observing his nude body from different angles. He never thought much about it as he did about his face. It served him well and that was the end of it.

"My sword is not on offer, woman," he said. "In other circumstances, I wouldn't mind tasting a Dornishwoman without having to pay for it."

"But not so now," she completed his thought and her examination of him. "I was just measuring our chances for success which depend greatly on your body."

"I'm not a horse for sale either," he murmured, somewhat embarrassed.

"I haven't said you were," she said. "A most impressive man for a Clegane abomination that you are in truth."

The quaint combination of a highborn insult and a peculiar courtesy she conceded him almost made Sandor laugh. He didn't have time for that.

"Shut up, will you?" he said. "We are going."

The water surface was calm and they made good progress in the first few hours. The Hound was pushing the raft, from inside the water, and the woman helped from within, rowing clumsily with a flat wooden pole. The boy kept quiet, fascinated by the experience of sailing.

Then, there was the current. Sandor had heard about it from the sailors in King's Landing. It was another reason they could not row all the way, apart from increasing the probability of being seen. Theirs was not a proper ship, and they were no seafarers. The Hound had to rely solely on his strength, and on Tyene's gentle steering by paddle on his instruction, to slowly direct their vessel against the current, towards the still distant white walls of the capital.

Towards the middle of the night, he would be sweating from exertion, if he weren't already wet to the bone. Yet, the effort was well worth it. They were passing behind the foreign fleet! No scouting boat, no watchful eye of a sentinel from the ships or a bird spying recognised what they were. The Hound used the proximity to estimate the strength of the fleet. He didn't like what he had seen. They had bigger ships than Stannis Baratheon did, more than Daenerys Stormborn brought with her. If Aegon aligned himself with his aunt, the Golden Company could help. Yet there were still the dead led by Greyjoy. If the ironborn forged an alliance with the foreigners, it could mean a disaster for the last of the Targaryens.

Then, there were the dragons...

A weapon not applied in war for centuries. If all three he had seen would come to the Targaryen aid, any outcome was possible. _Without the buggering wildfire as a means of defence_ , he hoped.

By the morning, they almost passed the foreign fleet, and he had to crawl up to hide, and dress to get some rest. He shivered like a stray dog in Lannisport after a forced bath in the harbour, curled on one edge of the raft, not to wet their supplies and the other two passengers. When he was satisfied that at least his body was dry, he squeezed his long hair in the water and shook it. He noticed it growing rapidly since he left the Quiet Isle. It was almost as if the change of seasons did something to it. _Sansa's hair is still longer,_ he remembered it falling to her waist, and wished to wrap the auburn locks around his arm. He would then bend over her body and enter her in a painfully slow way to delay his pleasure. _And hers,_ he imagined. _And she would be looking at me all the time._

When he dared to bring his body, all dressed up, closer to the Sand Snake, he was almost surprised she didn't try anything, having all the weapons at her disposal. Although she was at his mercy, a creature of the dry land in the middle of the sea, he almost expected some more aggression from Oberyn Martell's natural daughter. Her dark blue eyes were still ogling him with some curiosity and doubt, but she nonetheless kept very quiet and made place for him to lie down next to her and get some rest. He had a sip of water, no more than it was needed to stay alive, for the water skin they could bring contained only so much. The boy had some water too, and than he was chewing on a root the woman gave him, some odd thing from Dorne they would use to survive when travelling through the desert, she explained.

When the sun started its daily march in the middle of the sky, the man and the woman lay next to each other on their backs, gazing upwards, in the shadow of the reeds and grass which was their shelter, and the boy fell asleep. Occasionally, they moved the pole in the water, not to loose the distance they covered at night. If they still advanced, it was so slow, that they could not perceive it.

"You haven't looked at me, you know," she said, with newly found respect. "I mean, you have, but you haven't really seen my body. You only looked as far as it was needed for us to do this."

"So?" he didn't understand.

"I've seen you swimming now. You could have done it much faster by yourself," she said. "Most men would have demanded from a woman such as me a payment in kind for a service such as you are doing."

"If I can kill a woman, cut her in two, like I do with men, I may treat her as a man in other things as well," he said. "And I'd rather pay for my pleasure. I have no joy in cleaving an unwilling whore in two. I know what I am."

Oberyn's daughter laughed. "Do you?" she asked. "Or do you only look at your ugly face in the mirror when you are not seen? In other circumstances, I wouldn't mind sharing your bed from my own free will, if I could only avoid knowing your name. We don't think so much about it in Dorne, as people seem to do elsewhere in the Seven Kingdoms. It is a thing of nature as any other."

"Who is he?" the Hound asked, shrewd as always.

"Who is she?" Tyene Sand asked back. "You know, she would be pleased if she could see you have been keeping your faith." The Hound surprised himself by laughing at being discovered instead of growling at the woman as was his custom. The boy turned in his sleep. "We both deserve pity, I guess," he said.

"And we would both murder anyone who gives us that," she muttered with darkness in her gaze.

The autumn sun was high up in the sky when they fell asleep, each with thoughts of his or her own. No one knew what was on the boy's mind, but it may have been the land of ice where the eagles flew free. Where the brown eyes of his true father would veil over his sleep, a gentle song flowing calmly from his restless lute.

**Jaime**

"Elder Brother!" Ser Jaime Lannister shouted with revelation, pleased beyond measure to see the man of the Faith walking behind the bloody singer. "You are a septon, aren't you?"

It was just what Brienne and he required. Before Brienne changed her mind, or Aerys' daughter delivered on her intention to relieve him of his life, whatever came first. The arrival of the Elder Brother could almost be seen as a sign from the gods if Jaime were a religious man.

"I am a monk as you well knew before you asked," the man in question answered. The singer couldn't stop spitting horsehit about the mummery being played in front of the Great Sept of Baelor. Jaime turned deaf ears to that. He couldn't care less about the destiny of Ser Arthur Dayne, or even Prince Rhaegar, whose death he regretted deeply. Not on this day. He was naked to his waist and he enjoyed drying in the autumn sun. His left arm never let go of Brienne, partially armoured, sweaty, and too confused to talk. "A septon, still," Jaime insisted. "I have learned my letters in Casterly Rock. You _can_ perform a marriage rite."

"That I can," the Elder Brother agreed. "We need..."

"-Cloaks, I know, or at least one of them. Mine." Jaime said giddily, pulling a piece of scarf from the Elder Brother's head on an impulse. The odd black shine in the monk's dark eyes nearly stopped him, and only sheer arrogance helped him finish what he started, and muster some courtesy befitting his birth. "One ribbon will do, and for that I thank you, brother. Please, forgive me for being unthoughtful as only a man in love can be. You still have more than enough left to cover your head as is your desire, I reckon. Now to the golden part of my colours! Elder Brother, please guard the modesty of my lady in the company of our bloodthirsty wildling while I see to that."

Jaime's legs moved on their own in the direction the two other men had come from. The great sept where he last bedded Cersei over the dead body of their firstborn child loomed open before him. Jaime avoided the altars, and plunged in the dark corners behind them, looking for abandoned silks.

Just like he suspected, there was plenty of black and yellow Baratheon hangings, removed hastily not to offend the new rulers. He found two long stretches of fine heavy silk where the yellow resembled gold, and picked them up as a thief would, the black and the gold together, not to ruin the fabric. A maiden's cloak was not required for a valid marriage; it was only a matter of custom. But the man had to give his wife a cloak of his protection, just like he needed to bed her, to ensure his claim on her, there was no way around that. And Jaime needed a rather long cloak to wrap it around his bride.

He ran back like one haunted by the seven hells and found his betrothed, mute as a sword she had been carrying, walking with the Elder Brother and Mance Rayder further down the street.

"Where are we going?" he asked them.

"Back to the fishermen," the singer replied briefly.

"The ceremony could be performed in front of the city wall there, if you all agree, Elder Brother, my lady?" Jaime suggested immediately.

He was not going to wait for another hour.

No one explicitly agreed but no one refused either, so Jaime considered it done. He would marry Brienne in the sight of gods and men, in front of the ancient wall of white stone, the wall of Aegon the Conqueror, with one septon, some roosting ravens and the enemy from the north as their only witnesses. It was more than Tyrion had when he married Tysha as a boy. The walk was short and Jaime more excited with every step. He never thought he would marry anyone, since he understood Cersei would not want that. He thought even less that he would love the woman he was about to marry much more than he had ever loved his sister.

"My lady," he finally found the courage to address Brienne when they arrived. "I know you prefer instruments of steel to the high harp, yet you are a lady, and an heir to the House Tarth. I beg you to show patience and to indulge me for not offering you a true Lannister cloak, which would be my wish, and would match both your station and mine.

Clumsily, he intertwined the red ribbon through the holes in the upper part of the discarded golden and black altar hangings. The cloak he thus made shone in bastard colours for he could not completely hide the black. None of the men moved to give him a missing hand, and Brienne just gave him a bewildered look. It looked a bit like something his late son Joffrey could use, but at least it would be large enough for Brienne, and when he was done it didn't resemble curtains. _Small blessings,_ he thought.

"The propriety will be met as long as the cloak is yours, my lord," Brienne managed to say to that. It was the first coherent thing she uttered after his clumsy proposal on the waterfront. She looked as if she wanted to say more, but the words failed her, so she just positioned herself in front of the wall, first of all of them, waiting.

The Elder Brother recited the words the septon was supposed to say. Brienne and Jaime pledged their love when they took each other for spouses, kissing bluntly in the middle of the day. No one interrupted them as it would have happened if Jaime had married at Casterly Rock.

Jaime had removed the armour from her shoulders, and his cloak billowed over her tunic all the way to the stony pavement of the first Targaryens who had built the city, more beautiful than it should have been, considering its origin and the speed of the making. The silks gleamed with sunshine, and moved in such a way in the fresh breeze, that it appeared that the red and gold of the House Lannister was set upon the shiny black foundation of the House Targaryen, shading the plain black of the Baratheons. In a sign of new times.

Jaime took time to admire his bride when they parted from their kiss. She would never believe him if he told her she was magnificent, he suspected, but it didn't make her any less lovely.

Against his wishes in the matter, he suddenly felt a familiar and almost forgotten presence lurking in his mind, causing his guts to twist in apprehension.

The dragon could not be seen. By then, Jaime was used to Viserion hiding above the clouds so he only nervously asked him what he wanted in his mind, worried that the beast returned to take him only the gods knew where on a fool's errand. To his amazement, the reply he got was a confused sentiment of joy concerning Jaime's courage, for going after his heart, and not taking the easy way of _flying_ after his sister. _Their sister_ , sang the dragon for no one else to hear, and Jaime could not quite understand Viserion's thoughts on that count, but it was a source of relief that the beast seemed to congratulate him on his marriage rather than having more sinister intentions.

At that moment, Jaime believed that there was nothing that could possibly go wrong. He shut Viserion from his mind as hard as he could. Back to where he was, he noticed Brienne looking at him with the same apprehension he had felt for the different reasons.

Mance Rayder almost shoved them to the inside of the house. "I gave the fisherfolk some of your gold we haven't given to the alchemists," he said. "They will go and visit family outside the capital and only come back in three days. After your wedding night and after my mummery if all goes well."

"Get lost," Jaime told him. "Reading is for another day."

"The Daynes," Lady Brienne asked shyly. "They both die bravely, don't they? Just like Prince Rhaegar and Lady Lyanna." The fallen face of the singer was the only reply she needed to know she was right.

"We are not the Daynes," Jaime was compelled to whisper. "We will not share their fate."

"The Dragon Queen," she said, "she means to have your head. She has announced it before offering her pardon to all other nobles in the realm, even to Lady Cersei and Lord Greyjoy."

Seeing how the conversation was not going to end, Jaime showed Mance Rayder the way out.

"Come, wench," he told her then. "I have to make it up to you for the absence of the feast."

He untied her cloak and pulled her simple tunic open and over her head. He stepped out of his breeches, in _her_ colours, brought from Tarth, before she could object, or cringe away.

After everything they had been through, she was just passively waiting, like any noble maiden would, near the hearth where the pallets they had once woken up on still stood.

"Maybe there is a bed above," he suggested.

"Here, please," she said, and waited further. Her calm demeanour pouring cold water over his own determination. But the commanding spirit Tywin Lannister praised so much, imbibed by the force of his iron upbringing in his preferred son and heir since he was an infant, was not required. Only his desire, and he was not lacking in that.

"I thought about this for so long," Jaime said, "about making you my wife, in word, and in deed, the Kingsguard vows be damned. Since I met you again in the Riverlands, I think, if I want to be perfectly honest with you and with myself. Now the Kingsguard I swore my life to does no longer exist, and maybe the Seven Kingdoms as we know them will cease to exist as well, when the doom descends from the north. But you will be my wife before that and I will be the happiest of men still alive."

"Show me that," she said. "Now that we can see each other," she added as a second thought.

The modest light coming in through the windows of the small stone house was dazzling in comparison with the dungeon of the Red Keep where they almost gave in completely to the joint demand of their bodies, or with the cursed darkness of Highgarden where he dared to speak his mind, a feat incredibly more difficult than just succumbing to the senses.

Jaime was deeply moved by her hesitation. "Haven't I shown you already?" he asked.

"You did," she smiled for the first time since she pulled him out of the sea where the dragon had dumped him. "Just show me again."

He pressed her unburdened body to his chest, and kissed her hungrily, like tongues of flames devouring dry firewood. His only hand descended between her thighs where a pool of warmth has formed itself only from _looking_ at him, or from the noble vows they exchanged before the servant of the Seven.

"Gods," he told her kissing her breasts. "If I knew this when we fought near Maidenpool before I lost my hand, I would only use one kind of sword to fight you. And it would not be the one made of steel."

"And if I knew my heart would be yours," she said, "I would have never sworn any oath to Lady Catelyn, knowing how close I would be to breaking it when I was travelling with you."

Jaime would not waste any more time talking. He gently laid her down on a pallet in front of the empty hearth.

He muffled her pain with his lips, and ignored the golden voice coming to life again in his head, repeatedly calling him _brother_ , calling him _brave_ for following his heart.

Jaime found out long ago that bravery had nothing to do with love.

Loving only made you do things you were not proud of and forsake all honour and every vow you ever swore or cared about.

She pushed his face gently away, opening her eyes wide, searching for something in his. Her body yielded, but her eyes did not, and it was entirely maddening.

He lost the battle by closing his own.

And when she finally curled against his body, legs trembling next to his hips, he released his own wave of warmth inside her and buried his face in one of her strong shoulders.

There, he placed unnecessary kisses, where passion dwindled and undiluted love remained. And his wife caressed him, not bothered by his weight, warm and resting, not in a hurry to leave or to make him pull out of her. She traced his back, and his golden hair.

Fire kept burning behind his eyelids, and a mighty lion still roared in his chest. He realised that Brienne's sigil was not an animal, but a blazing sun, stronger than any beast. So later on during their wedding night, she dared bedding _him_ , besting him in love, as she had once outmatched him with the blade.

"Most improper for a lady," he told her when he was the one pressed to the pallet. He pushed his left hand between them, helping her to reach the pleasure she didn't know she was seeking, enjoying the look of shocked surprise on her face when her body utterly betrayed her, just before his grip on his own body abandoned him again.

"Am I your wife now?" she asked in all innocence.

"My wench, my woman, my love," he rambled, a lion drifting into sleep. "My wife and no one else's."

"Jaime," she murmured, and he could still hear her in the beginning of his dream. "I was always fond of your name."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who commented, left a kudos, or bookmarked this story. I hope that this somewhat shorter update from pinkolifant on vacation, with love, is not disappointing.


	44. The Paramour of Prince Lewyn Martell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the mummery starts

**Sansa**

Lord Walder Frey was among the first ones to reach the capital from all the high lords and knights Princess Daenerys had invited to the mummery. Although his seat was too far from King's Landing to arrive there in only two days, a raven must have found him visiting one of his many sons or daughters who married to a castle nearby. Freys became a good match after their alliance with Lord Tywin Lannister, although it was as short lived as Lord Tywin himself after the Red Wedding.

Lord Frey bent his knee to the Mother of Dragons despite that he could barely walk, well past his ninetieth name day. His sons and his bastards carried him to her presence in a litter draped with fineries earned with the northern blood. Sansa noticed how the costly hangings were arranged on his carriage with a taste of a lesser house posing above its position and wealth, without any sense for colour or for order. _Not that a pretty palanquin would matter to the queen in a game of thrones_ , she thought, wiser for the short time she had lived.

Daenerys was receiving the oaths of fealty in front of her ship, and Sansa sat in her court, on a large pillow seat in the green grass turning brown and rotting from too much water brought by the autumn rains. She was very near the queen, as a beloved child would be, in a precious blue gown the queen's maids have made for her from foreign silks. It attracted the eye but it preserved her modesty unlike the gowns grown too tight Cersei let her wear when she was a hostage of the Lannister crown. A few pale yellow lace ribbons adorned her bodice and her sleeves, widening smoothly around her wrists. Sansa's eyes were cast down, just like she used to do in Joffrey's court.

Lord Walder Frey had barely finished his solemn oath of faith when he proceeded to ask favours of the Queen.

"Your Grace," he said, "I thank you for your kind invitation and for your royal pardons of my so-called crimes in the eyes of gods. I have indeed helped to kill the Young Wolf at his uncle's wedding. Robb Stark gave his word to marry one of my daughters and then dishonoured us by marrying to a lesser house than mine, old in name, yet now clothed in tatters. The Young Wolf's father, Lord Eddard, was the right Hand of the Usurper and the man who helped most to set the Usurper on the Iron Throne, washed in blood of the dragons. The Starks have always been your enemies. In sign of your gratitude for my noble deeds against your foes, now and then, I dare ask you to grant me a small favour. My last wife has just died and I feel like I have it in me to take one more before my days are numbered by the gods. If you value my service to your house, I ask you to give me the hand of the Lady Sansa Stark in marriage. I will rule the North for you and you will never have known a more faithful servant."

Daenerys Stormborn lowered her eyes, purple rather than lilac on that day, yet colder than stone in the crypts of Winterfell, conceding only one glance to the latest suitor of the Lady Sansa, who for her part kept looking down, unmoving in her display of dignity. Ser Barristan Selmy stood guard in front of the queen, in a shiny white armour of the Queensguard, sword at ready, as if an almost nine and ninety years old man in front of her could still do her harm.

"Lord Frey," she said, staring forward and through the man in question. "Thank you for your oath of fealty and for honouring my invitation. It is very kind of you to offer more services to my house than those you have already named as such, and to honour my ward, the Lady Sansa Stark, with the proposal of marriage."

"Lady Stark," she addressed Sansa then with equal coldness. "Rest assured that I shall consider all such matters concerning your person only when the mummery is done and when the matter of the validity of your first marriage is resolved by the High Septon to the satisfaction of all. Then, if the Faith allows you to marry, I will ask only one thing of you. That you hear out in person the proposal of the lord whom I will deem worthy of an alliance and of your hand. Do I have your word that you will accept this terms? Or shall I answer Lord Frey immediately?"

The decision in the eyes of the queen held no trace of doubt and Sansa understood it more than well. Despite any services she may have done to Daenerys by spying on Lord Euron or helping the queen before Drogon took them to safety when they were both enslaved, despite all the queen's gestures of friendship and kindness towards Sansa, if she was to refuse the terms offered, she was to be betrothed to Lord Frey as a reward. Frozen on the inside, Sansa gathered her courtesies and gave the answer Daenerys wanted to hear. "Thank you, Your Grace. I will do as you ask, you have my word."

"You have heard my ward, Lord Frey," Daenerys said to the air above the old man's head. "Until the mummery is done, I beg you find the suitable accommodation in the capital and join us on the morrow."

When Lord Frey was gone, carrying with him a gleam of satisfaction on his old cunning face, Sansa burst into tears before the next lord would be brought to the presence of the Queen.

"Lady Sansa," Daenerys said, measuring her words. "Surely you understand how a queen needs to respond in her court."

"I do," Sansa said. "It is just that, Your Grace, I do not wish to marry. I have recently experienced a calling of the Faith and I seek to become a septa, or a silent sister if I may."

The queen examined Sansa with keen eyes. For a moment, an innocent face of a harmless young girl she wore the whole day in court was replaced by an expression more cunning than Lord Frey or even Petyr possessed. A new kind of fear washed over Sansa when the Mother of Dragons spoke again with a sense of finality. "The proposals for your hand are many, and I have yet to ponder my decision. So I will say it again. When I ask you to hear out one of your many suitors, of my choosing, it would be _wise_ to at least listen to his suit. That is all I have to say in the matter."

Thus spoke the daughter of Aerys II, the Mad King, who let Sansa's grandfather Lord Rickard Stark burn alive in his armour while his eldest son Brandon choked trying to help him.

"Thank you, Your Grace," Sansa mumbled, defeated. _Please, let it not be Lord Frey._ The unavoidable demands of duty were returning for Sansa after being invisible for a long while, offering an illusion she could be left alone. She abandoned Petyr who only wanted to marry her according to his designs, but Daenerys, or any other conqueror in the game of thrones, would have them just the same. _A noble alliance forged with my body._ Sansa Stark had no family to protect her like Margaery Tyrell did. She wondered if there were more dangerous nets with jewels such as she received as a gift from Lady Olenna among the treasures of the Red Keep. She could choose to wear one on her new wedding day if they made her marry a Frey. Or ask the queen to allow Sandor Clegane to follow her as a sworn shield and spread her legs for him whenever the occasion allowed.

 _But he would hate it_ , Sansa was certain.

Not because he cared about the propriety or the custom. He would hate it for it would all be a lie. He told her everyone was a liar in court, yet all he ever wanted from Sansa was the truth. And when she delved deeper, to the place inside her where she was very much a Stark, she despised lies just as well. As much or more than he did, for as much as she learned to accept it was the way of the world. That was at least one single thing they had in common, different in most other matters like the sun and the moon. Strange as it was, it gave her hope.

She suspected the Hound would not be able to stand and watch how another man became her lord husband, even if he was once able to watch Joffrey beat her. Not after he gave himself to her, as surely as she gave herself to him. _He would not let me go,_ she hoped and she feared it at the same time. For the last thing she yearned for was to see his head on a spike or his body eaten or _burned_ by the dragons.

Sansa was still barely able to tell a straightforward lie without getting caught. She regretted deeply it took so many deaths of her loved ones, among them Septa Mordane, to learn what her septa meant when she named the courtesy a lady's armour. The empty well-spoken phrases satisfied Sansa's need to believe in goodness and order of the world where little true kindness could be found. She believed they may have helped her survive, and that was all.

But with Sandor Clegane she tasted the unadorned truth of the world as it could sometimes be. She had known the rare precious moments whose meaning could not be put into words, yet it was nevertheless there. Lovelier than all the intricacies of polite speech. More fulfilling than Sansa's dreams of home which no longer existed. More certain than the gods she believed in. She could remember and see in new light every detail of their acquaintance since the Hound rode into Winterfell after Prince Joffrey and Ser Jaime, or since he frightened her on the kingsroad.

Sansa finally understood why the songs she loved so well were still written in a world as cruel as it was, and why there were so many of them. Not for being the truth, not at all. It was only that men and women were compelled to speak of both the profound happiness and the sorrow that had befallen them, and which could not be contained fully in ordinary words. So the words grew in number, shaped verses and tales, and spoke to each other over the depths of time, creating well or less well crafted recollections of those moments of truth. It could well be that Sansa was not as stupid as she thought for still clinging to her songs. Maybe Petyr was stupid for believing that life was not a song or for not knowing what life was. Or what life could all be. Her conclusion gave her force, and she daintily wiped the last traces of her tears.

"Lady Sansa," Daenerys said, trying to sound like a young girl she pretended to be. "Do not worry about your marriage for now. I too will have to marry some day. We may yet hold a feast together, and rejoice."

"Perhaps," Sansa tried to agree, although the consolation she was hastily offered had been hollow. She had dared to believe Daenerys was different, only to discover she was made of the same stuff as all her previous keepers. She would marry her off to a Frey if it suited her goals. Sansa frantically thought of what else to say, not to sound ungrateful. "But not too many courses should be served, if it please you," she managed in the end. "Less than seventy-seven at any rate, Your Grace."

"My lady, Sansa, I could gladly agree to that," the queen said with a laugh full of crystals wrought of dragon glass. "And no golden locusts by any means!" She was not ashamed to sound as Sansa's _friend_ , just like Petyr used to feign he was having only Sansa's best interest in his mind when he posed as her loving father.

Sansa stared forward, suppressing the desire to weep further. She carefully arranged a pale yellow ribbon the wind carried to her face and sighed in sign of acceptance.

 _It is all a lie_ , she thought. _More elaborate that the gown I was made to wear._

When Lord Mace Tyrell approached the queen and he too, recently widowed, made a proposal for Sansa's hand, her face remained impassive, and her attire was immaculately adjusted. He was the last highborn lord to be received on that day. Lord Baelish too had asked to marry Sansa earlier that morning. The line of men competing for Sansa's hand, and with it for the rule over the North, would be steadily growing as it seemed.

She should have been more terrified. Or she should have applied Petyr's teachings and bend the queen's will to her own, either to avoid marriage or to marry according to her own designs for power, and never, never for love.

Sansa found she couldn't do any of it. Instead, she agreed to play a game of cyvasse with Daenerys when all the lords and ladies were gone. The Dragon Queen had no love for Sansa but at least she had not had her beaten, or kissed. The maids whispered a lot of the queen's tastes in bed. In their rumours Daenerys did kiss some of them, at times, for loneliness or pleasure; the maids could only guess her reasons. Cyvasse figures drew their prudent moves on the board, and Sansa's soul was elsewhere. She was in Highgarden again and Sandor was inside her, as the pain she prepared herself for was being reborn into something else entirely. A different oath, a promise, a waking dream. She wanted to absorb him, not minding his weight, his scars, his hatred, she needed all that, she needed him.

Just like he was.

When she lay on her cot in the belly of the ship that night, the last one before the mummery, Sansa could not hold to her memory from Highgarden any longer. It started fading as the red roses with the arrival of winter, as the memory of a kiss the Hound never gave her in King's Landing. Her sadness regarding imminent marriage prospects had slowly crept back through the crevices of the ship with the sea breeze, together with the first stars slowly rising in the sky. In solitude she could finally drop all her courtesies and let the blood of the First Men stream unbound through her veins, breaking through the strong and dutiful Tully part of her heritage. Then, she understood her aunt and why she had to love Prince Rhaegar, who acted towards her a fool, not the prince he was, asking for nothing in return. Then, she wished for the Hound to come back to her, and kill all her suitors with her father's sword, ice cold and sharp like a sting of the implacable winter.

Sansa remained awake for hours, drifting from wishing she could run away to acceptance of what was awaiting her as someone's ward. Before uneasy sleep saved her from her thoughts, and contrary to all she had ever been taught, Sansa was glad she loved a killer.

And not a true knight.

**Brienne**

Brienne walked back to the room where Jaime made her his wife. _And I made him my husband._ She blushed at the thought, straightening a clean short sleeved tunic and male breeches she put on. _Black, the colour of the dragons._ she realized. _Clegane's more than likely,_ she rearranged her thoughts as she did her garments. A play about an important part of Jaime's life was being read out several times on the outside since the first light. She believed he should come out and see it then. Not to discover first hand what the singer has made of it in the presence of the high lords and ladies, who would enjoy the Kingslayer's discomfort, whispering merrily against him where once they had to stay quiet if they wanted to keep their heads.

"Jaime," she called to him tenderly, remaining vulnerable, remaining honourable, remaining Brienne. Her husband had removed the armour from her shoulders, and she was not going to don it back. Not for him, if for all the rest.

"You left," he murmured, displeased.

"I'm right here," she said. "It's just that they have woken me with reading. Come and see, please. Trust me. This time there is no Lady Stoneheart I am taking you too."

Jaime smiled in an open and simple way she had never seen on him, and accepted her muscled armed to get up. Together they sat on the doorstep, which had seen its share of rehearsals and whispered conversations, since the mummers started residing in the house.

Two children were holding hands under the watchful eye of Mance Rayder, in front of the wall where Jaime and Brienne were married.

"I love you, sweet sister," the boy said. "I will take the white, and become the greatest knight in the realm to be worthy of your love."

"Sweet brother," the girl said. "You are already the bravest knight of all. Please, do not leave me."

The children had black hair, and no blond curls to grace them. The boy towered over the girl, overgrown in a fortnight. His pale hands shook like in an old man, from an obvious ailment of the body.

"It is the only way I can always be with you," young Robert Arryn said sweetly, reading the role of Ser Jaime Lannister. "Or father will find me a wife and make me rule Casterly Rock. And then he will send you away to marry Prince Rhaegar. This way I can guard you when you become my queen. Our father is very powerful. Rhaegar has no sister and he is some years older than us, past the age to marry. So King Aerys will surely accept your betrothal to his son."

"Don't leave me, please," Willow Heddle repeated, reading the role of Cersei Lannister. "You are mine. You are a part of me. You ought to do as I say." The girl stood on the tip of her toes and grabbed the boy by the shoulders. When he leaned down, only a little bit, she placed a chaste peck on the boy's lips and immediately withdrew from their clumsy embrace, smiling.

"I won't, I promise," the boy said, embracing the girl in return, keeping a proper distance, an image of a knight from the books courting his lady love.

The children bowed to the public, and Mance Rayder shot an inquisitive look at Jaime. Brienne leaned to her husband, afraid of his reaction.

"Some time after that, I have sworn the Kingsguard vows, and Prince Rhaegar married Elia," Jaime said thoughtfully as one searching in his memories. "Father never told me that Aerys refused his son's betrothal to my sister with as much scorn as he could muster. And it was not little, believe me. I never learned when Cersei was told. She was often bitter about not marrying Rhaegar when she became the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Her husband was a very different king than Aerys was, or that Rhaegar may have been..."

A wave of pity and love swirled through Brienne's chest. What was the bet about her maidenhead, rough and crude, in comparison with the subtle torture of the mind she now suspected Jaime had lived through, torn between the commanding spirits of his father and his sister?

"The innocence I have lost," her husband said peacefully to Mance Rayder, "you have captured it well. It was the beginning of all the wrong I have done later on."

"If you are able to see it that way now," the singer said, "you may yet regain some of what you have lost."

"I have already gained more than I ever had the right to receive," Jaime said, turning to Brienne. Fire flickered under his eyelids with unmistakable delight of the senses. Brienne endured and returned his look, applying considerable force of her will to do so, conquering an impulse to cast her eyes down to her boots.

"This conversation between siblings takes place before the main story of my play starts," Mance said cautiously, weighing Jaime's response to his words. "I will sing of it as a dream or a memory of yours before the other scene with you is played, the one I would still like to rehearse before you now, if I may."

"I know," Jaime said, and his eyes darkened. "Best be done with it then. If I could withstand remembering this part of my life as my past, and nothing more, I should have no trouble with any other sin I committed later on."

Brienne embraced her _husband_ on a doorstep, not believing him fully, even if she adored his words. She wanted to be his present and his future, and one day also his past. A past that wouldn't bring him any shame.

Ser Lyn Corbray walked to the wall of Aegon the Conqueror, in the cloak of black and red, in true colours of fire and blood. Before she woke up Jaime, Brienne learned that Mance sang for it to the women washing royal garments in the Red Keep, and won it as a reward for his prowess with the lute.

With blinding madness in his eyes, Aerys II motioned to his faithful helper, played by some sparrow Mance must have found in the streets, one of those who were still bringing shoes to worship the Elder Brother instead of the Seven.

"How did you make Corbray's eyes look purple?" Jaime inquired and it was only then that Brienne noticed too that the colour of Ser Lyn's eyes was wrong, and not what the nature had given him.

"Tears of Lys," Mance said. "I asked here and there if it can be done and how. One drop, a quantity that does not kill, will make any naturally dark eyes, black, brown or grey look purple. The same will not work on blue or green eyes. The effect is maintained if you go on taking the poison regularly, and if you do not, the natural colour of your eyes returns... "

"My pyromancer," Aerys II said with expectation, "it is time to illustrate your art to the entire world in your wisdom."

"Bring forth the fruit of your work," Aerys II continued with loathing. "My son and heir lies dead on the fields of Trident, and my Hand, Tywin Lannister plots to change sides and betray me."

"What shall we do, Your Grace?" the sparrow peeped weakly.

"Burn them all!" Aerys commanded. "Burn this entire city, its people, its nobles, its smallfolk, even its whores. I, the rightful ruler, will burn with them, and be reborn as a dragon of old!"

"But, Your Grace-" the pyromancer tried to object.

"-Just burn them all, haven't you heard me? Burn them all!" Corbray bellowed with grace, opening his arms like a dragon Aerys II believed himself to be would have spread his wings, threatening the imaginary crowd, which consisted only of Brienne and Jaime, watching.

When Aerys II stood up from his high seat of stone, built that morning in front of the wall of Aegon the Conqueror, just on the spot where the famous Aegon's descendant's true killer had married the night before, a thin blade protruded between his body and his shoulder as if it had just crossed his back.

"I can't let you do it," Sweetrobin stuttered from behind the stone throne. "I can't, my king, I'm so sorry."

Fat tears crawled down the boy's cheeks as he chased the sparrow pyromancer who tried to run away, piercing him in make-believe with the same thin sword that killed the king, wrought most likely of gilded copper, but shining like pure gold.

The boy than sat down on the flat stone, from which the king had fallen. Pieces of chopped wood behind his back posed as the swords melted in the Iron Throne. The boy looked steadily forward, avoiding looking at the two bodies at his feet. Focused, he positioned the thin golden-looking blade over his knees and waited.

"I didn't speak that much when I did what I did," Jaime said very slowly after a tremendously long while. "But the essence of what was passing through my golden head is there, I believe. I stopped being a knight on that day."

"On the contrary," Lord Arryn said, abandoning his role and his posture. Wiping the unmanly tears he still carried on his face with the speed of a child, he scurried to the side and returned with his own blade and a new pretty shield with the falcon of his house. Brienne noticed how the little lord's hands shook less when he took hold of his own weaponry. "Ser, you have done a brave and a noble deed on that day. King Aegon and his aunt have to see that."

"Thank you, boy," Jaime said. "But there is nothing noble in stabbing a king and his servant in their backs.

"If that is all..." Jaime said, most likely wishing to leave.

"It is," Mance added.

"How did you know?" Jaime asked.

"You missed one pyromancer. He hid in the skull of Balerion the Black Dread in the throne room. He kept quiet for years, and he is a pyromancer still," Mance Rayder said. "I have a gift to tell stories and also to make others tell me their own..."

"I see," Jaime said with unseeing eyes that placed a weight of steel in Brienne's guts. "Then we will all meet tonight for the mummery. I need to clear my head."

"If you please," the singer offered Brienne and Jaime a long parchment each. "Your final lines if you care to read them before tonight."

"Thank you," Brienne took things in her own strong arms, picking up all the scrolls, Jaime's and hers, careful to gather all the writings, and her husband's only hand. She placed a huge kiss on his cheek, smiling when her heartfelt gesture brought some life back to his thinned noble features.

"My lady," he said, returning to his usual provoking mood. "Should we return inside, to continue where we stopped in the night?"

"No," Brienne denied him, and her. "Or a bit later," she blushed. "I would walk a bit with you now. If you are not embarrassed to be seen with your wife in the streets, that is."

Her own unwanted challenge worked a miracle. Jaime's left arm sneaked around her waist, and his expression turned from badly hidden suffering to unhidden pride.

"I want everyone to know, and to see," he said to confirm his gesture. "Let us revisit this awful city with new eyes, together."

**The paramour of a Prince of Dorne**

Tristana Waters stepped out into the shady garden of her house, in the better part of King's Landing, combing her greying long hair. She would go to the mummery everyone was talking about. It would be the first time she left her house in months. She was very old for a woman, a bit older than Ser Barristan Selmy who had recently returned to King's Landing too, as rumour had it, and whom she would like to see again. Age notwithstanding, Tristana kept the brightness of her spirit and she was eager to hear some songs and see how some people from the old times fared. Even if it meant a certain remembrance of how Lewyn rode to the fields of the Trident with Rhaegar, never to return.

A bastard of King's Landing and the paramour of Prince Lewyn Martell of Dorne, Tristana was left with enough gold and coin in the Iron Bank of Braavos. She led a peaceful existence, never reminding the Iron Throne of that fact. When she passed an ivory comb to the tangles of her long hair, she sensed, rather than saw somebody, watching her in silence.

Her uninvited guest sat in a dark corner of the garden, obscured by the dark green needles of a southern pine-tree. When he saw her, he rose on his feet, taller than the Mountain that Rode before a black dragon sealed its death in the green hills of Highgarden, according to the latest gossip. Tristana's visitor was very well hidden in the long black robes. Large cowl obscured his face and his body was immersed in wide dark folds in such a way that it could have been anyone. A man, a woman, or a child.

"Who are you?" she asked. It seemed quaint, but she wasn't afraid of the tall intruder. It was as if she expected this particular guest ever since Lewyn died, to be able to speak up about the past. "Are you Aegon or Daenerys?" she asked. "For only they might have an interest to see me after all these years. Everyone else who might wish to do so died long time ago."

The guest sat again, handing her a writing in strange elaborate letters, refusing to talk or to reveal his face.

She looked at the mysterious stranger and nodded. The times were changing, the dragons were back, and someone understood what poor Lewyn had done out of love for Elia.

"You want to know what Lewyn told Rhaegar when they rode to the Trident together," she read part of the writing out loud.

The figure nodded, not moving another muscle.

"You have to understand," Tristana tried to explain the best she could. "Lewyn loved Elia. We all do things that shame us to help the ones we love."

The threatening huge figure turned its cowled head, impatiently, in disagreement, looking as if it were going to burst in flames, engulfing Tristana and her orderly garden.

"Please," she said, "forgive me for voicing my thoughts of an old woman who lived alone for more than she can tell. I will tell you what I know and you can do with it anything you want. If I do, I might die in peace. For I may well be the only person still alive with that sad knowledge."

Tristana looked away from the stranger in her garden, weighing the possibility that it was Daenerys or Aegon who had come to learn the truth. There was no way to tell and she had to speak carefully.

"Aerys came to see Lewyn in this house, where he normally stayed when he was off duty. Only a few of his brothers from the Kingsguard knew about its whereabouts but the king had spies, and when he needed the knowledge to find it, he found it very fast," she finally said, remembering one of the saddest days in her long life, as if it had happened only the day before. She relived it often, burdened and hurting from what she had learned. "He told Lewyn Rhaegar was going to publicly abandon Elia, Rhaenys and Aegon, and wed Lyanna Stark, if someone he trusted didn't teach him the truth about the whore from the North."

The stranger did not like the word whore, she could tell, so Tristana hurried to clarify. "It was the king who called Lady Lyanna that, not I. Lewyn was apprehensive and suspicious. He asked what Rhaegar should learn about. Aerys than said Lyanna bedded Rhaegar only to become the queen. And once she would succeed in that, she would abandon his bed for the maidenly sheets of his best friend, and most trusted member of the Kingsguard, stronger and more handsome than Rhaegar on all counts. Northern whores liked their men powerful, Aerys said, not the weak ones who stayed awake to read at night or loved to play the high harp. She would not stop until she had Ser Arthur Dayne."

Tristana changed position on her seat, observing the stranger turning more restless than the sea in winter.

"Lewyn... He didn't believe the king. Lewyn and Aerys were closer in age than Lewyn and Rhaegar were. Above that, Lewyn came as close to a friend as it was possible to be with a man like Aerys II Targaryen in his later life. So Lewyn let him finish his accusation, and then he asked in cold blood what kind of men were the dream of noble whores from the Westerlands... I never understood what he had meant, but Aerys's features turned green from fury... He slapped Lewyn over his face and nearly choked him to death with his bare hands without calling for his guards. I have never seen the old king that angry. Not even when Ser Barristan rescued him from his imprisonment in Duskendale... Lewyn managed to push the king away and then he swore he would do anything to keep Rhaegar's heart with Elia. He swore he would tell anything Aerys wanted, but he bid the king to first tell him the truth of Rhaegar and Lyanna, not the court gossip or a lie of king's choosing. He said Ser Arthur Dayne did not care for women, even if Lady Lyanna was the kind of woman Aerys had said she had been. He begged Aerys on his knees to tell him the truth of the matter."

Tristana had to pause, feeling the burning gaze of the stranger in her garden on her moving lips.

"The king..." she said, "the king stared at the ground weighing his choices. Than he gave Lewyn what he wanted. The truth. He said both Rhaegar and Lyanna were so honourable that they would never break faith with each other. He said Lyanna loved Rhaegar more than her life from what his spies were able to discern. He said Arthur Dayne would die for both of them as Rhaegar's best friend. He said, that... unlike the whore from the Westerlands, Lyanna was not only beautiful, but honourable and truthful, and a thousand times more dangerous for Elia than if she had been a whore. He retold how Lyanna, a wisp of a young girl, so short that she barely came to Aerys's or Rhaegar's chest, was not afraid to provoke the wrath of the dragon king, one of the very few men or women who were not. He told how she dressed up as a mystery knight and defeated three tall strong squires with a single lance, to preserve the honour of her father's bannerman from the Neck as a true Stark... Aerys was impressed with Lyanna as much as he was afraid of her and her influence on his son."

"Then, Lewyn believed him and feared for Elia's destiny. He went to the Trident and told Rhaegar that Arthur and Lyanna were paramours behind his back. He told him Lyanna invited him, Lewyn, to her bed too, during the tourney in Harrenhal, but he had refused her. He told him Arthur and Lyanna laughed at him... At the prince who was not man enough, and not a true dragon..."

The stranger rose to his full height and looked exactly as Tristana imagined the god of death. "It was all a lie," she whispered. "Poor Lewyn. He told all that and yet they all died... Even Aerys, in the end. The gods have seen fit to punish them all..."

Tristana cried from the force of her memories. She didn't notice when her guest left and she remained weeping in the garden, alone. The ivory comb lay among the flowers, waiting for his lady to come to her senses, and finish dressing up for the mummery.

**Sandor**

When the next evening came, Sandor Clegane started swimming again. They were nearly past the enemy fleet and approaching the last ships of Daenerys Targaryen. When the moon rose, flapping of wings was heard in the silence of the night, and soon the sky above them turned black, with no moonlight and no stars.

A tongue of flame passed the Hound in the water and nearly scorched the blond-haired woman on the boat who luckily had the presence of the mind to roll on a side faster than a snake and avoid it.

"Daenerys' dragon," she said in awe. Another burst of flame pierced a hole in the raft where Tyene had been lying moments ago. The boy woke up and started crying from exhaustion.

The Hound didn't waste time. He climbed back to the vessel of wood and reed, and positioned his huge body, dripping water, between the woman and the menace of the dragon, forgetting his distaste for fire.

"I am a natural daughter of the House Martell," she said behind him, foolishly. "We are the most trusted allies of the dragons, old and new."

But the mention of her house only enraged the animal further, as if the House Martell was the main enemy of the Targaryens. Sandor Clegane knew they would all sink in the next gust of flame. He might be able to swim with the boy to one of the Daenerys's ships, but the Sand Snake would die. He snarled towards the sky.

"Look at me!" he growled in frustration, not expecting the dragon to listen. He was stupid to free the beasts, and now he might die from them. Or Tyene and the boy would die if he swam away like a dog he was. A boy younger than Sandor when Gregor burned him, a boy who enjoyed building boats. "I did all I could for you beasts, and you, you, you let me live! Me, Sandor Clegane, a brother of the Mountain who butchered dragon children. I don't know why but you did it! Why now attack a Dornishwoman only for her father's name, and with her the son of Mance Rayder?"

He felt Tyene's gaze on his back, and he thought he felt the dragon relenting, as he kept protecting the woman and the boy with the barrier of his body.

The world turned cold and freezing when light autumn rain began to fall on the raft. But the black wings were gone, and the stars showed up again on the clearing sky.

"You... you are a Clegane!" she parroted.

"How clever of you," he retorted. "So what?"

"The dragon..." she stuttered, "he would do your bidding but not mine. He approved of you. Why didn't you tell me you were a dragon friend?"

"I'm not one. But even if I were and if I told you that, would you have believed me?" the Hound barked like a rabid dog, shivering from cold in the rain.

"I guess not," she said.

"There you have it," he said. "The dragons do not care about men, nor about the houses and their fealty. They do as they please."

"Then I am glad that it pleased the dragon to fly away," she muttered. But she looked at the Hound with such respect, larger than an innocent maiden would offer to a true knight who came to save her from a blood-thirsty beast.

"Let us continue," he said.

**Tyene**

Way before morning, they were on the shore facing the Mud Gate, and the Hound must have been exhausted. He didn't even react when Tyene helped him out of the shallow water to the firm land, nor when she wiped his body in her own travelling cloak, as a mother would do to a child, until he was dry and falling asleep on the ground. She dressed him up, covered him with dry grass, and watched him closely, together with the boy. When the light came, Tyene walked to the city gates and found them closed for all.

"His Grace King Aegon and his noble aunt commanded all gates to be shut until the mummery is finished," a guard explained instantly, eyeing Tyene's beauty and innocent blond hair as men were wont to do.

When she heard all the news she could obtain from the guards, she ran back and mercilessly hit the Hound with her hands and feet, avoiding the sensitive parts in an almost unconscious man, until he stirred awake.

"I would have let you sleep," she said. "But the mummery will start this afternoon, and I suspect they will give someone else your role if you don't show up. That is the least how the mummers did in Dorne when I was young: more of them would exchange in the same role if one would fall ill, or was otherwise unable to play. The city gates are closed. If I were you, and if I wanted to read my bloody role, I would walk on the rocks under the city walls, until the part you know well, where the fishermen live. Over there, it is possible to scale it with bare feet."

"Thank you," he told her without thinking, and Tyene took his hands in hers.

"For what it's worth," she said. "I am sorry for the way I treated you. I would have never made it here without you."

"What will you do?" the Hound asked.

"Wait until they open the gates," Tyene answered lazily. "Play with the boy. Tell him tales of vipers in Dorne. I am in no hurry."

**Sansa**

The stage for the mummery was made in front of the Great Sept of Baelor.

The high dais stood on the end of the stairs where the head of Lord Eddard Stark had rolled, although he was innocent of any crime in the eyes of either gods or men.

Sansa was wearing a simple grey dress, holding a mask of white weirwood ready to cover her face. She stood behind the stage, in the Hall of Lamps, watching the noble guests come in from all sides of the city. There were many of them from all lands. From the Riverlands, the Reach, the West, the Stormlands, and all the way from the borders of Dorne. The envoys of Prince Doran Martell came on fastest horses in Westeros, and barely made it to the capital before the closure of the gates, she heard. Sansa wondered if their delay was the reason Prince Doran did not ask for her hand yet, or if his wife was still alive.

All lesser nobles and hedge knights who could come to King's Landing on time gathered to see the play wild stories were being told about. Smallfolk followed them like cattle. The plaza of the great sept was more crowded than when Joffrey executed Sansa's father. Daenerys was in the front row with Ser Barristan, and Aegon was with her, in the company of Jeyne as his only guard, hooded deeply in the softness of dark velvet.

When the heralds announced Lord Walder Frey, a few people whistled, and when they announced Lady Cersei Lannister and her son Tommen Lannister, absolute silence reigned. Lady Cersei wore thick bracelets of odd transparent crystals on both arms all the way to her elbows. Her blond hair was of a lighter shade than the usual golden one. It fell almost to her knees in a long single braid in Myrish style. She was more beautiful than ever, in a new yellow gown woven with red threads.

The queen and her nephew did not move an eyebrow to acknowledge any of that.

Last came Lord Euron Greyjoy who had not come to swear fealty to Daenerys before. The lord of the krakens stood proudly in front of the queen, looking her in the eye.

"What are you ready to give me, woman," he asked, "to stop my alliance with the slavers?"

Sansa watched Daenerys stand up slowly. The Dragon Queen surprised Euron by walking to him, unguarded, and taking his dark face with both silvery hands. With passion, she kissed him on his lips. It was not chaste, Sansa knew. It was devouring as the Hound did with Sansa, and despite being a lady she had loved every moment of it.

When the queen backed away, more solemn than before, Lord Euron was more confused than a green boy. It was clearly the last thing he expected.

"My queen," he stuttered, as Daenerys took his hand, leading him to a place on her right side. She made him seat on the cushion of green silk between her and Aegon.

"Lord Greyjoy," she said. "Welcome to my court. May you find that an alliance with me brings other and greater benefits than anything the slavers offered to you as a reward."

Sansa could still feel Daenerys' hatred for Lord Euron, stronger than ever, yet the queen spoke words to him which were almost of love.

 _She is a better liar than Petyr,_ Sansa confirmed her earlier suspicion, fearing to the bone the intentions of the Mother of Dragons towards her, a mere warden of the Iron Throne.

To make things worse, Sandor Clegane was still missing, and Ser Daven was going to read his part.

Sansa decided to think of Sandor with every word she would speak for her Aunt Lyanna. She knew that if she did that, the multitude would see true love in her eyes, more abundant than the autumn shower which luckily stopped in the morning before the mummery.

It was time.

Sansa donned the weirwood mask and walked out to the stage, her red-rimmed blue eyes searching in the mass, hoping to see the hulking figure hounding her dreams and every step, breaking his way through.

He was not there.

Wherever he was, he had no time to arrive. Or he was captured by the slaver's fleet for Sansa was certain he was not with Euron. Her excursions to the army of the dead continued in the past days, since the first successful one, to confirm discreetly that no firm alliance or promise had been made between two enemies, and that Lord Euron would accept Daenerys's invitation, making it seem like a last moment decision.

Daenerys Stormborn told her to call her Dany, but Sansa could not bring herself to obey her in that. It would be the same like calling Joffrey Joff to his face or continue to love him deeply after he had put her father to death.

Sansa stood in the middle of the stage, alone, and the people watching turned more quiet than dust in the grave. She noticed Lord Walder Frey among the nobles, watching her with lust and murder in his eyes, his thoughts concerning Sansa clearer than those of Sandor's horse. _I will not live long in that marriage if it ever comes to pass,_ she realized.

She heard steps behind her back and nearly turned to face Ser Daven as she was supposed to do.

Before she would turn, she heard him.

"They say that Winterfell is cold, my lady, and that no flowers grow among its walls," a deep burned voice rasped behind her back, different than whenever she had heard it before. Full of expectation, and hope.

Her love came back to her as if stealing cursed horns, freeing dragons and finding a safe way into the city under siege was the most natural and the easiest thing to do.

The mountain of ice in Sansa's heart melted, as a dark lake in the grove of the old gods would, when dreaming of spring.

Lady Lyanna Stark greeted the unknown man, who would reveal himself to be Prince Rhaegar later on, with the most enchanting smile that had ever been seen in Westeros.

Her smile had sealed the fate of the Seven Kingdoms, as well as her own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part came out faster than usual, must be the rain where I am now. Please let me know what you think and don't hate me for spelling mistakes.


	45. The Alcove of the Stranger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the mummery is interrupted

**Sandor**

"They say that Winterfell is cold, my lady, and that no flowers grow among its walls," Sandor told Sansa in one breath, not needing a parchment, nor the prompter graces of Ser Daven, suddenly degraded from the main character to that rather ungrateful role, lacking in glory.

"That may be so," Sansa raised her head defiantly just like she had done on the Quiet Isle when she recognised the Hound by the sound of his voice. Back then, Sandor Clegane's soul had trembled from matters he would not admit to himself, for the very first time with an intensity unhindered by his position of a dog at court. Sansa's eyes now glowed with an entirely new flame, something he had never seen in them in the light of the day. Her gaze searched for something under his white mask, half-donned. He could almost see a part of the scar where his ear used to be, protruding, a shame visible to the highborn and the lowborn alike, to everyone who had gathered for the play.

"How is it then that one has grown outside?" he mocked her because it has always been the easiest thing to do. And also to mask his own discomfort for taking part in the nonsense of the play, something he never believed he would do in earnest. He would believe even less that he would nearly break his neck scaling the wall of the capital to arrive _on time_ for the bloody mummery. Mocking was also what Rhaegar did when he met Lyanna if Sandor Clegane still remembered well what Mance wrote. Sansa would not hold it against him, he hoped.

"How do you know that I am not a lady of this castle?" she asked, and her ice blue gaze cut through him as the winter-coloured steel of her father's sword might. _It would be sweet to die by her hand,_ he thought, bewildered, and mocked her further.

"A lady would not be seen outside, training with a lance. Weapons are for men," he breathed out, and, on an impulse, he took the short lance she had been holding from her hands, the one she had found in Harrenhal. Ruthlessly, he examined the weapon and tossed it away, several steps further down the stage they were standing on.

"Do you consider yourself a man?" Sansa said in wrath that made her even more beautiful and taller than she was.

"Isn't it obvious? I am one," he said with cocky certainty. That was an easy line. Whatever Gregor had done, Sandor Clegane remained a man still.

"Then where is your weapon, man? You seem to have forgotten it. There are foul things in the woods of Winterfell waiting for pretty knights as yourself. You should run back behind the walls while you still can and leave the free folk to walk in peace of the old gods before they curse you and come for your miserable soul," Sansa's voice became a threatening hiss of the tempestuous wind, sounding as a white tree with red eyes would, if it could speak. Inside, the Hound was reduced to the small burned boy he once was. And who had indeed scurried to Sansa like a cur, _unarmed_ , for any blade, Valyrian or not, would have made it next to impossible to climb the wall.

"Are you a wildling, then?" the Hound said with care, uncertain about everything all of a sudden. _Is she truly angry with me? Does she still find me hateful after..._

"Perhaps," she said, untouched in her courtesies of a great lady.

 _How could I ever bring myself to think she would want me?_ Sandor Clegane's thoughts dwelt in the melancholy he hated more than he sometimes hated himself. Until he was saved from that cursed place in his wounded soul by the warmth of the fire of the black dragon, whose invisible wings flapped restlessly somewhere over and above the great sept. It made him remember the words the Elder Brother had added to the first meeting of Rhaegar and Lyanna.

"If we ever meet again, I will name you the Wild Rose of Winterfell and you will know me for who I am," he said with unhidden longing, unashamed to show that part of himself, even if more than a thousand men had been watching.

The clapping of the multitude of hands was deafening, the cheers jubilant, the whistles of approval interrupted the players.

Sansa made a step closer to him, appearing equally confused and undecided on how to continue. Mance or Ser Daven were nowhere to be seen when a mummer would need counsel, it seemed.

Then, a cloud of smoke surged in the grey sky above the Red Keep. The cheering died, and his dead kraken lordship took a simple knife from his boots, catching old Ser Barristan by surprise. He pierced the soft unarmoured skin on the older man's cheek, missing his eye by a hair's width. Blood blinded the old knight while Euron set out to grope his queen. Sandor cursed the _honourable_ custom that Kingsguard should not wear helms on solemn festivities.

A dozen ironborn started hacking their way to their lord through the crowd, uttering cries of murder and pillage. Lord Walder Frey and some others of his station and courage ran for shelter to the sept.

Sandor was unarmed and his little bird was watching, petrified, her mouth slightly ajar in apprehension. Feeling the anger rising in the black dragon above, the Hound left it to the animal to help his mother, the queen. Rapidly, he collected a short lance from the stage. It was like a dwarf's weapon to him, but it was made of solid wood, and its top was still wrought of steel. Two men, ironborn or mocking bird servants, advanced on him, but a well-aimed blow, dealt with the Hound's ferocious strength, made them fly away, rushing as steeply down the high stairs as an eagle would to catch his prey. More men would come after Sansa, the second prize to Daenerys herself. The Hound used the break he thus earned to push her in the Hall of Lamps, all the way through the growing crowd of the nobles looking for a place to hide, afraid for their skins and precious possessions. He stood there for a moment, pondering where to go. In the edge of his vision he noticed how Aegon, the bastard of Arthur Dayne, unsheathed Dayne's sword and launched an attack against Greyjoy, faster than a black dragon was able to descend from the clouds.

 _Time to see what you are made of, boy,_ he thought, and pushed Sansa further into the sept, to the only place he deemed moderately safe to hide his greatest treasure.

The alcove was dark and empty as he expected. Sansa shivered and stepped away from him, examining her surroundings. She blinked to better see in the dark.

"There are never any candles here," he told her to break the silence, his earlier uneasiness about the two of them returning in all its majesty.

**Aegon**

_The Tears of Lys,_ Aegon thought desperately when he came in front of the Great Sept of Baelor, almost hand in hand with Daenerys Stormborn. _With the rightful queen,_ he thought. When Jeyne had dragged him to the small house somewhere in the city, screeching and squeezing his shoulder with her dead hands, rarely unashamed of what she was under her cloak, Aegon did not know what he would find.

But seeing the purple eyes of the Targaryens in a minor knight from the Vale, he understood.

He wondered what colour his own eyes would reacquire when the correct quantity of poison Septa Lemore had him ingest over the years to hide his true identity, and possibly to save his life, would vanish from his blood. _I am not your nephew,_ he thought, looking at Daenerys. He was not even disappointed, he was almost relieved to confirm the terrible doubts besieging him since he tried sitting the Iron Throne. _And the only person who may know who I am is gone,_ he lamented, regretting ever pouring his heart on a witless parchment so that others could use it and abuse it as the will of their so-called king, who was no king at all, to try and kill the only mother he had ever known. He wondered if Jon knew and he suspected he did not. Jon Connington always believed blindly that Aegon was Rhaegar's son.

Under the weight of guilt, the arrival of Euron Greyjoy passed in a blur. Aegon only came to his senses during the first scene of the mummery. He did not understand at all where the northern singer was heading, but the connection between the two masked players was such that he subconsciously sought Jeyne's hand. She didn't take it. Instead she took his sword two inches out of its scabbard, and cut her own finger on the visible part of the shining blade, showing him several drops of black blood.

"You said we would stay together, my lady," he whispered, afraid of her intentions.

Her only answer was to grasp a dagger he wore on his hip, and cut her other hand, which remained unblemished in death.

"So Valyrian steel can hurt you, where the ordinary one cannot," Aegon commented, forgetting to cheer for the players who have finished the scene.

His Jeyne stared at Lord Greyjoy, and sharply, Aegon understood, fully awake at last, and not a second too late. For Ser Barristan writhed on the floor, and Euron took hold of the queen's arm.

"Over my dead body," Aegon muttered through his teeth, unsheathing the sword which had always felt like his true heritage unlike the throne Jon Connington had put him on. In one leap he pushed himself between Daenerys and Euron, colliding with the other man, severing the lord's grip from her slender arm by the sheer speed of his approach. Lord Euron bared his sword too. The kraken's onslaught was wild, filled with unnatural fierceness. Aegon may have been weaker but his skill with the sword was unmatched, or so the Old Griff had always told him. Maybe it was a lie as everything else, but Aegon chose to believe in it, parrying every blow with a cunning one of his own. He was skinnier and faster than the man he fought, wondering if he fought a man at all. Or rather a creature as Jeyne was made to be... The sadness of Aegon's thought almost cost him his head when a strike of kraken's steel nearly found his neck. Moving to the side, he succeeded in placing a shallow cut under Lord Euron's knees.

The kraken paused for two seconds in surprise to see black blood dripping from his leg, and Aegon found an occasion to speak.

"Your friends haven't told you, have they?" he said with contempt. "That the sword such as the one you had before the dragon took it away _can_ kill you. And it _will_ kill you if it is in my power to achieve that."

Euron ran against him as a wild boar. Aegon defended himself and stepped aside again, but he too felt warm blood oozing from one of his sides. Not having much time, he forgot his sorrows and all his upbringing. He was no longer a child yearning to know who he was, no longer a young man allowing himself to wallow in the throes of unrequited love.

He was one with his sword, and that sword was called Dawn.

Aegon turned the milk-coloured blade flat towards the shy patch of autumn sun in the middle of the sky. And in conjunction it gleamed brighter than two suns on the summer sky would. Its shine blinded Euron's one black eye, and he had to hide it with his hand. Aegon aimed a blow at his sword hand, disarming him. Then he kicked the black wound on his leg viciously, and brought the one eyed lord to his knees. Dawn rested calmly against his dead throat, glimmering still.

"What shall it be, my lord?" Aegon asked. "A swift _final_ death, or a punishment by the laws of the realm?"

They taught Rhaegar's heir to be a king, not a killer, and they had taught him well.

"I yield," the kraken lord stuttered, lacking in arrogance. "I yield to the queen's justice."

**Elder Brother**

The Elder Brother ran forward from the sept as soon as he had seen Ser Barristan fall. Skilfully, he stopped the bleeding on the elderly knight's face, oblivious to the duel of Aegon Targaryen and Euron Greyjoy behind his back. When he was done, he looked back and around only to notice that the battle in front of the sept was almost over. Daenerys stood in front of Lord Euron held prisoner, flanked by a black dragon. Lady Jeyne was seeing to the cut on Aegon's hip. The Golden Company sellswords have nearly overcome the rest of the ironborn, the crowd and the nobles have run away. The doors to the sept were barred, and he noticed Jaime Lannister trying to get in, but whoever was behind, would not let him.

The black smoke was rising thicker above the Red Keep, and its odd smell of burning attracted the Elder Brother's attention. The fire stank as the fire should not, creating stench and unhealthy odours in the city. He recalled all his knowledge of substances, of healing, and of his visits to the Citadel. None of those memories made him any cleverer.

Fast as the tongues of fire, he retracted to the sept, not noticing how old Ser Barristan Selmy opened his eyes on the ground where he still lay and offered the monk a look of gratitude and utter bewilderment, as if he had seen a man who had risen from his grave, and not a monk from the Quiet Isle. Ser Barristan rubbed his eyes, and his vision was gone when his consciousness returned. There was only the monk left, walking to the doors of the great sept.

"Ser Jaime," the Elder Brother called the blond man, younger than him by some years, not knowing what else to call him, since he had learned more of his life and circumstance.

"My wife is inside," Jaime responded, unrelenting, trying to pull open the great oak door.

"She should be rather safe in there, I dare say," the monk said. "Mance has barricaded the high lords in, I heard him shout to Lord Blackwood and Ser Daven for help before I ran out myself. Lady Brienne was with him, helping with orderly retreat. Look!" he had to shake the lion to turn his attention elsewhere.

And he succeeded. The smoke was hypnotic to a pair of brilliant green eyes, sparkled with the faintest gleam of yellow. "The stench," Jaime said.

"Yes," the Elder Brother repeated. And had a revelation surging somewhere from his past, from the beginning of his learning of the art of the healer, he assumed. "Wildfire," he said and Ser Jaime's eyes narrowed.

"Follow me," Jaime called the monk, and both men trod down the street, towards the end of the Street of Silk where the Hound once found Jaime and Tommen in the sewers of the city. "I hope I can still remember the way," Jaime said.

The Elder Brother followed him like a manse sheep, answering the inner calling almost as strong as the calling of his Faith. As they progressed through the sewer, the odour of melting stone became stronger than all the excrement vapours of the capital around them. The passage climbed, and the soil dried. They arrived to the dungeons of the Red Keep.

"It was somewhere here," Jaime said, groping for a way in the dark.

In the absence of light, they were following their nose. The Elder Brother felt the Mad King's armour on his chest, and the red stones Sansa sewed like rubies to the holes in the black metal. He put it on before the play under his monk's cloak for it could also serve as an armour of Lord Eddard Stark, the role he would read. Stark would wear plain grey, but the mummers owned such armour as they had. He wished those stones were rubies in truth, hoping that the blood-coloured jewels could shed some light on their path.

"Here!" Jaime exclaimed with confidence, finding a narrow opening on the bottom of the wall through which a man grown could only crawl in. The Elder Brother heard a rustle of clothing, and understood Jaime was undressing. "Don't worry about your modesty, Elder Brother," he joked. "I am only interested in my lady wife."

The Elder Brother caught himself _chuckling_ like a man, not a monk, at the rude comment. Jaime was through the hole in an instant, lithe as a wild cat, and the Elder Brother waited, noticing for the first time a faint green glow coming from the inside.

The stench that guided them became unbearable.

"Elder Brother," Jaime's voice called him from far away. "Please come in. You can crawl in with your clothing on. Someone has removed the jar blocking the entry so it has become easier to access this place. Please. I need help."

The monk decided he trusted Ser Jaime Lannister, and slithered through the passage on the Mad King's armour. As a slow-going snake, or a giant lizard, his fingers found the end of the tunnel he was passing through. The green shine brightened, illuminating a tangle of blond curls standing above a jar of the dangerous substance. The lion's hair looked almost silver in the unearthly light.

Carefully, the Elder Brother lowered his long thin body to the floor between two similar closed jars of stone, or hardened clay, it was too dark to tell.

"It's burning through the ceiling of the dungeons," Jaime said. "But it goes slowly, for now. We might be under the courtyard, and that is why the smoke is rising so high in the open air. I think we should close it again, but the lid is too heavy to move. It's easier to carry the entire jar than to lift it with precision required to close it. Whoever did this, they just pushed this jar out of the place and toppled the lid over, or the other way around, and then they left in a hurry. Touch it carefully, it may be hot."

The hotness of the touch did not frighten the monk. He never had trouble fetching dishes from over the fire in the Quiet Isle where the community did their cooking. Brother Cook had the same lack of sensitivity towards the flames. The Elder Brother suspected that their mutual injuries in Robert's Rebellion somehow damaged the sensitive tissue in their fingers. There was no way to prove it either way. And if it served the purpose of the Seven, so much the better.

The monk touched the jar and its lid. It was warm but no more than that.

"It's warm," he said.

"It's bloody hot, but still bearable," said Ser Jaime attempting the same.

"Let's do it together," the Elder Brother suggested. Both men bowed forward and took the lid in both arms, or an arm and a stump, as it was the case. The monk felt cold sweat on his forehead and under the armour. It was very heavy.

With a clang, they managed to place it on the bottle, but the fissure had not closed, nowhere nearly enough.

As soon as they let it go, the lid rolled clamorously back to the ground.

"Again," Ser Jaime said.

Their second attempt was even less successful, and the green substance foamed higher. The Elder Brother unclasped the Mad King's armour from his chest and pressed it on the jar. It was not perfect, but it was better. The ominous bubbling lessened, and the smoke was contained within, leaving them in green-coloured darkness.

"Aerys would use steel resistant to his own vile concoction, I think," he told Ser Jaime. "If anyone could have such a thing made by the smiths, he would."

Yet they were not certain if they succeeded in removing the threat, and many other jars loomed around them, waiting for a spark that would send them all alight, and the lives in the capital in no more than dust.

"We have to take it with us," the Elder Brother said what Ser Jaime thought. "Mance has to call that pyromancer he found, he should know how to make it stable again."

"There are only two passages out of here," Jaime said, "the tunnel where we came form, too low to push the jar through, and a stair leading downward to the dungeons on a perpendicular wall. The jar is too heavy for either of us to carry it when climbing down."

"King Maegor was a resentful man, they say," the Elder Brother said, thinking hard. "They say that every room in the Red Keep has at least three exits and entries." He noticed that the younger man did not share his faith in old histories, but he nevertheless went around to check. Some of the residual green twinkling floated in the stinky air, helping in his rapid search. After some time of walking in vain, he was lucky to stumble upon it. It was a large door, masked in the wall on the side of the room where no wildfire was stored. The door was still opening when they used the hem of the monk's cloak to dust off and uncover the knob, closed for many changes of seasons. The Elder Brother was the first one in the new passage, ignoring his usual being prone to caution, while Jaime lingered behind, since he had to turn back first, to dress once more.

The monk had to stoop slightly to walk in the tunnel, putting the jar forward with care, from one place to another, two steps by two. He would transport it as far as necessary through the labyrinth of the dead Targaryens. Jaime soon caught up with him and they advanced slowly, not knowing what they would find. After a while, the air started smelling fresh, almost as the sea was near, yet they did not go down; they were steadily climbing.

"If we continue this way, we will come out to the great sept itself or on the top of Visenya's Hill," said the Elder Brother, wishing for the latter outcome. The last thing he wanted in his peace-loving heart was to bring a deadly weapon to the house of the Seven full of people who only wanted safety.

After a few more steps, a door opened on the right side of the corridor, to a small square room, a treasury of the kind. It had books, and scrolls, and tapestries with the three-headed dragon.

"One more place where Robert must have banished items he didn't want to spoil his view with," Jaime said with scorn, noticing the Elder Brother peeking in with scholarly curiosity. Jaime took the jar over, and moved it to the next place, alternating the support between his hand and his stump to mitigate the excessive warmth. The Elder Brother noticed his effort and was grateful for his own loss of sensitivity to heat, for which he was able to carry forward the cursed thing with greater ease.

"It was not King Robert," the Elder Brother told his companion, venturing into the space they found. "The objects are ordered, and meticulously selected. King Robert or his men would not be so careful." Compelled by curiosity, he went further, and picked up a shield, a quill and a lute from different parts of the room, all of quality making.

Another token drew all his attention then, and he almost forgot about wildfire. The vision was so shocking that he needed Jaime to leave first.

"Let's go," the Elder Brother cautiously commanded the man who only read the part of Ser Arthur Dayne, regretting he was not with the Sword of the Morning in person. The famous knight may have known what to do. When the blond curly head had the grace to leave the door opening, to move their burden further up, the Elder Brother picked up the finding that shocked him, hanging it on his belt, tucked safely under the cloak, and invisible to all.

The path twisted further, and soon there was no doubt. If they continued, they would bring the wildfire to the sept. They came to a crossing where one way would take them to the middle of the house of the gods, and the other to one of its more secluded corners.

"Ser Jaime," the Elder Brother said, "I trust that the Seven will guard me. It is best if you go that way and alert the singer to find this pyromancer." The younger man was reluctant, so the monk decided to behave as a man of the world might. Calmly, he mentioned: "Your wife may be looking for you."

Jaime stumbled forward immediately, not needing further motivation, and the Elder Brother continued transporting the damaged wildfire jar, closed by the armour of its dead maker, oblivious to the heat it emitted. He meant what he said to Ser Jaime.

He could not accept that burning alive would be his destiny. Somehow, in his devoted heart, he knew that it would not.

**Sandor**

"Where are we?" Sansa asked as a frightened deer. Only the words "my lord" were missing in her speech for the Hound to see again the young girl who had come to King's Landing following her father and his destiny all those years ago. The time since he had met her seemed short, yet more meaningful than his pitiful existence beforehand.

"Behind the altar of one of the gods," he mumbled in a reply, keeping distance from her. _What did you expect, dog?_ he scorned himself. _That she would jump in your arms? But she did smile at you when she saw your masked face as she had never done before._

"Which one?" she whispered as if she already knew the answer, but she still needed to hear it from his damaged mouth.

"The one no one lights candles to," he responded wryly, and he could hear her sigh, with disgust or relief, he did not know.

"I returned," he said with finality when none of them spoke for a very long while. All the ugly noise of the clash of steel, and the screams of confusion inside and outside the sept slowly diluted into unbreakable silence. The skirmish must have been short, and the smallfolk started cheering for the Mother of the Dragons on the plaza and the stairs, all around the statue of her ancestor Baelor Targaryen. The high lords must have started coming out of their shelters like worms would surge among the corpses after a real battle, swearing loyalty to Queen Daenerys with renewed fervour. The black dragon was with her, Sandor sensed its presence, wondering where it headed when it was flying above the Blackwater and attacked the Sand Snake in its wrath. Wherever it went, the beast returned soon enough. He asked himself if Sansa felt it, too.

"You asked me to, and I returned," he repeated, wishing for her to say anything at all.

"The queen means to arrange a new marriage for me after the mummery," Sansa said flatly. "I should be most grateful."

His heart would have broken then if something at the end of her sentence did not let him believe she had not been grateful at all. Her gentle voice sounded exactly the same as when she would tell Joffrey that her brother was a traitor.

"I was bringing back your favour as you requested," Sandor Clegane continued, ignoring her words, searching his chest for a strap of white linen stained with blood, embroidered with the golden roses of the House Tyrell. "Shall I give it back to you?"

But Sansa's favour was not to be found, left in front of the gates of the city with her father's sword and his own, when the hands of another woman had put him back on his feet in his weakness.

He could barely see Sansa's heart-shaped face in the softened light, a reflection of the glimmering candles from the other altars, entering only in a slanted, clandestine way into the dark alcove of the Stranger. The hazy glow only made her features more lovely. And his own more grotesque, he supposed.

"It was yours to keep," she whispered, and he heard trepidation in her kind voice, for the first time since he came back.

"Was it?" he asked wickedly, not caring about the propriety, the moment, or the sept.

"What, pray?" she did not catch his meaning just like he expected.

"Mine to keep," he finished his thought and the distance between them.

She let herself be captured in the cage of his arms as if his embrace was what she had expected all along. _So I should have jumped on you,_ he thought, distracted.

"My love," she said.

 _Not a lord,_ he had almost corrected her before she finished addressing him. The words she did say could not be real. Yet they were, and her arms sank deeply in his chest when she continued speaking. "I am pleased to see you and yet I fear for you. The queen could harm you if she knows that I... that we..."

"She promised _anything_ to the man who would bring her the horn in case you haven't heard," the Hound said, feeling invincible, even if it was only an illusion. "She held one of her promises so far for the mummery has started. The Dragon Princess honoured Mance Rayder instead of shortening his wildling head as a queen ought to do." Sandor Clegane strengthened his grip on Sansa, trying to believe his own words, and she did not seem to mind.

"King Robert promised many things to my father," Sansa said, nesting in his arms. "You can't save me from the queen's true designs with regard to my person."

"Probably not," the Hound had to agree. "But I could try. If you... If you want me to." It was as much as he could swear to do, painfully sober and still tired from swimming. If he had been drunk, he would only wish to kill them all. With too much clarity in his head he ferociously tried to think of something more clever, something that would protect her if Daenerys had changed her mind. There had to be a way.

"It is most unseemly," she said, hiding her face in his shoulder, recently torn open by a white walker, _sniffing_ him, was she? Her hands ran nervously over his tunic-clad body. "We are in the house of the gods. But I... I..."

The Hound took his hands to her face and removed the mask she was still wearing, and Sansa imitated his gesture as a bird from Summer Isles would learn to repeat what her gaolers wanted. They could see a little bit more of each other, their faces so close that they could feel the warmth of each other's breath dampening their skin where the sweat dried cold after running. Sansa never removed her hands from his cheeks after she let the weirwood disguise slide away from the disfigured dark mass of his scars. She looked and she didn't look at his face, as a timid hue of red conquered her own in the sparse candlelight. Her hands did look at him in place of her eyes, caressing and searching, scar, hair, and skin. Sandor Clegane felt his face melt again, as it did so long ago, but the cause was not fire.

The Hound's legs felt weak as if he were a blushing maiden, and not a man-at-arms.

Behind them, in the farthest part of an alcove, there was a prominent mildly curved carving in the wall where one could lean to adore the face of the Stranger in undisturbed peace. They stumbled towards it, until she was half-seated on it. At the height with his waist, he noticed, unable to halt his rapid bodily response at the mere glimpse of where that could take them. The stone artisan work under her resting figure was almost as smooth as fabric, probably unused ever since the sept was built. In the alcoves of the rest of the Seven, the same place had known a shape of numberless faithful arses in prayer. It bent and it flattened under their plump bodies. It was not to be so with the Stranger.

"It was you in Highgarden," he said, more for reassurance than for needing any further answers. Drunk from her, more than he ever was from wine, he lifted a simple layer of the warm grey skirts she wore. Sansa did not oppose it, staying close to him, waiting for what he would do next.

"It was beautiful, in Highgarden," she breathed out softer than the rain would fall, sweeter than any song he had wanted from her in the long summer.

"Why me?" he asked, stupidly, pushing his hand deep under all the defences of her dress, confirming her body's agreement with the wishes of his own.

She kissed him then, finding it too unseemly to answer, or so he mocked her in his head. Yet his mouth did not open to speak offence, but to welcome hers. His fingers wondered freely, in places where he always imagined them hurting her with their roughness and size, yet the wetness around them spoke a different language.

She tried to lay down under him on the cold stone. He could see her septa telling her that was the only _proper_ way to lie with a man. He held her in place, strong enough on his huge feet to support both his weight and her own. Stopped in her intentions, she mimicked his gestures again, diving both hands in his breeches. He heard the knot in laces going loose. The useless garment descended to his ankles, making it easy to step out of it. His hands travelled up then, finding her breasts, swollen, rising and falling with the erratic pattern of her breathing.

Their bodies soon joined in such a natural way as if his seven feet of muscle were nothing for her, tall for a woman, but a woman still. His feverish dreams of bedding Sansa, be it in King's Landing or in the Quiet Isle, frequently ended in nightmares where he would break her, make her bleed, cause her pain, as Gregor did with his wives. In them, his brother would laugh at him and tell him they were one and the same.

Sandor held Sansa firmly in place and stopped being afraid.

Slowly, he loosened his grip to give her some room, half-expecting she would get away. But she only bucked against him, imitating the guidance of his hands from earlier on.

"I saw them like this in the kitchens and stables in the Vale," she whispered in confidence when she found her voice. "The maids and cooks, or stable boys, or squires. I'd walk away from it, in shame."

The Hound grabbed her again deciding that she was not walking away from him until they were done.

"Not because of what they did," she chirped on quietly, in need to explain. "It is just that many times when I came across them, I imagined how it might be if it was you, and me, like this, in the Red Keep, or in some castle that existed only in my head..."

Soldiers always told it took women far more time and effort than men to find their pleasure. Most men the Hound knew didn't think it worth trying. Women clenched their teeth and endured men, or pretended to enjoy to earn money or favours. It was known.

It was all a lie when it came to him, with Sansa.

The discovery made him wonder briefly if any other woman ever came undone from his attentions, without him being the wiser for it.

Sansa did, and it was the end of the world as he had known it. She moved and she tasted in a way he had never seen. In a way he could not imagine it in any of his dreams for never seeing such a thing before. Her bliss must have lasted longer than it did in Highgarden, or so he thought. And mere _thinking_ back to how she twirled in delight, one foot somehow ending next to the ruin of his face, led to his own undoing in a bright passing moment of unspoiled happiness.

"My love," she called him _that_ again when he shuddered violently, losing the ability to exist. "Tomorrow I will light a candle to the Stranger to thank him for your safe return."

"Brother," a faint, familiar, iron-coloured voice called to Sandor Clegane from deep under ground, uncertain. "Is it you?"

"Elder Brother?" Sandor muttered in a rasp nowhere deep enough, waking up from a living dream.

They barely found time to reacquire some decency, before the bandaged head of the man of the Seven made its way through a secret passage in the floor, ending under the sculpted feet of the god of death. Sansa put her mask back on, to hide her state of distress, the Hound reckoned, from the servant of the Faith.

Stranger had his back turned to the alcove. His wooden eyes observed the sept in front of it with keen expression. The Elder Brother's face was not visible from a large bulk he held secured to his chest. Using a tremendously slow and deliberate movement, the monk lowered to the ground a jar just like Sandor Clegane had seen the Imp's men use in the battle of Blackwater. The Hound had run away, never to see it again. Yet there it was.

_Wildfire._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who left a kudos and commented on previous chapter. Please review further if it pleases you :-). The part with Elder Brother and Jaime may get slightly rewritten but here it goes for now.


	46. Beloved Nephew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the worth of a queen is measured

**Lady Stoneheart**

"It was not supposed to go that way," the older voice reprimanded the somewhat younger one under the protection of the darkness, with well practised authority.

"No, it wasn't," the younger one agreed, unwillingly, not loosing the overtone of utmost superiority it almost always possessed. "But it can still be arranged."

High stone fencing, surmounted with iron bars, loomed around two hooded figures talking, gesticulating wildly with three skeletal, bony arms, in the awfully fresh air of the night.

"How?" the older one rebelled. "The queen and the false king should have been in irreconcilable enmity! Not that his Blackfyre sellswords and he in person defend her and slice down the ironborn warriors like animal fat! And even if they did not, her beast would have buried its claws deep in the squid's dead flesh before he ever managed to throw his black cloak upon her and force her to be his wife in front of all."

"Maybe not," the younger voice calculated. "Euron would have cut her throat wide open before the dragon could have landed…"

"So you wanted Daenerys dead, didn't you? Contrary to what you told poor Euron?"

The younger, more stubborn man, did not speak.

"Always loyal to a new master and to none of them fully," the aged voice concluded in unbroken silence. "Be as it may, there was no need for a bloody dragon to land! What with the bastard of the sister of the Sword of the Morning doing the beast's filthy work…." the old manly drawl complained as if he were an elderly woman whose cooking had gone wrong on her daughter's wedding day. "If _that_ little piece of knowledge on Aegon is true at all, and not only something you told me and spread around to foster your own goals, unbeknownst to me."

"As true as when you had Lord Stark's sword re-forged and delivered as a gift to Lord Greyjoy without telling me!" the thinner voice accused, rising in volume over the borders of the precinct, in a garden abandoned at the late hour. Hushed sounds of pleasure, and others, of pain, all of them muted and unclear, penetrated the night air from the house in front of which the two figures were stuck in disagreement.

"It was an unfortunate omission," the old voice admitted. "I suppose you wanted to wear it yourself on the occasion of wedding his daughter. The queen promised you her hand, didn't she?"

"Not in so many words, but she has refused all her other suitors with well chosen elaborate excuses," the mocking voice said, convinced of his superiority. "I care little for the queen, yet I can handle her in need. She will not be as malleable as Aegon may have been in the right circumstances. Raised by a septa… Indeed… I am willing to agree; even _I_ have made a mistake in that regard. If I had known his septa was as feisty, I would have never approached the impostor dragon or the old griffin fool with any propositions."

"Quiet, my friend," the older voice admonished with fear. "The very air in this city has eyes and ears."

"Not so in the back yard of the whorehouse not even Lord Varys knows that I own," the young voice said placidly. "Orton Merryweather runs it for me. And pray, tell me, who would ever dream to look for the High Septon in a place like this?"

"What are you proposing now?" the gnarled voice changed the matter at hand.

"I will speak to Euron before his execution like I spoke to Lemore. I suspect him to be a more willing listener to my pleas. He can still have his revenge, if not the woman he wanted. I know I would want it in his place. His priest did not reveal himself in the crowd. Moqorro can summon the army of the dead on behalf of Euron, to align with the slavers and attack the city when the fools open the doors after the mummery. And when they do, all the dragons in the known world will not be able to help Daenerys Targaryen…"

"And if she accesses her father's wildfire stock before that?"

"As if Cersei would ever tell her where that is. The Whore Queen is the only one who knew it at court, she and Qyburn who is no longer with us. Alas, neither are the pyromancers. My men made short work of the two of them still in existence. Before they died, _bravely,_ I have to say, they confessed everything to my loyal Kettleblacks, who survived not only the fornications with Cersei, but also _your gentle_ questioning, mind you. The dying pyromancers told that the place enjoyed a special protection and could not be easily entered. Soon, my friend and ally, I will be the master of Aerys' wildfire. So, please, spare me your petty worries," Lord Baelish said showing his thin face from under the hood, adorned with a neatly trimmed goatee, its expression becoming more and more confident in the pale moon, who shyly showed her half-rounded face over the garden wasted on selling false pleasures. "You will keep your high duty of the Faith and your head on your shoulders, which is way more than you deserve if you ask me, or the Kettleblacks, for an honest opinion. And I, I will acquire what my heart has always desired."

"What?" the older man spat out like a curse.

"The young Catelyn Stark, of course," Baelish said sheepishly to the night air that stirred. "In the shape of her lovely daughter, who dared lying to me that she was no longer a maid to mislead me."

"Was that why you betrayed the late Lady Catelyn's husband when he asked for your help?" the High Septon did not yet exhaust all his arrows.

"That man did not need my help to die. He did too well on his own," the mocking bird stated.

"Still, septons and sparrows talk much," the insistent old voice insinuated, turned overly prudent, if not any kinder with age. "If I am to send my Warrior's Sons as envoys to the slavers and compromise my head further in this _alliance_ of ours, it is only fair that I know this of you. Have you or have you not betrayed Lord Eddard Stark?"

"You wound me too deeply, Your Holiness," Baelish said. "It is not my fault that my late wife Lisa Arryn, born Tully, wrote to Catelyn Stark, and blamed the Lannisters for her late husband's murder, when it was Lysa herself who served Jon Arryn the tears of Lys with her gentle soothing hand… Amidst soft kisses on his wrinkled neck… It was a hard life, for a young blossoming woman like Lysa to endure the attentions of a man thrice her age."

"A poison procured by a friendly bird-like hand, no doubt, accompanied by whispers of what she could do, and what joy she could feel between her legs if she did it right…"

"An interesting tale and no more than that," Littlefinger refused the notion as a master of coin would turn down an unfavourable loan. "Your rusty sword suffers from too vivid fantasies."

"I am sure your own weapon will be nowhere nearly as dried out as mine when you reach my number of name days," High Septon continued in a vein most unseemly for the highest servant of the Seven. "Not after you sharpen your failing tiny sword at the entrance of your sweet lady wife to be…"

"Enough!" the mocking bird said. "So we do have an understanding?"

"I will send out the sons of the Faith to the faithless foreigners as you wish to be done," the High Septon said. "And when either Lord Euron or a godless slaver receives my blessing as a rightful king, you will tell me everything you know about how Lord Eddard Stark met his untimely death…"

"As soon as you wed me to his lovely daughter and the bedding ceremony is completed," Baelish squeezed through his teeth.

"Before the wedding and the bedding, at the door of the sept if it pleases you, and if you do not choose to tell me earlier," the old man said lazily, striking his final bargain.

"I accept," Baelish said, accomplished. "And now, Your Holiness, I will take your leave. There are still some final arrangements to be made. By the queen's command the mummery will restart tomorrow at first light. And your slavers with _my_ dead should storm the gates at nightfall. There should be no mistakes this time. No saviours or heroes. No dragons either."

"Only the vultures," the High Septon noted, sighing, seemingly having second thoughts all of a sudden. "My lord, shouldn't we consider halting all this? Daenerys still trusts us and she doesn't strike me like merciful for all her innocent expressions."

"She is maintaining a fame of a hard woman by the ill-placed stories of her counsellors, but she is as kind as her brother Rhaegar had been," Baelish dismissed the argument. "And he drowned in the stinky river like a peasant after he had been butchered like a pig."

"Rhaegar had no dragons," the High Septon tried his last weapon.

"No," the mocking bird said. "And his unfortunate sister only has one. Where are the other two that ran away in Highgarden? Why didn't they fly back to their mother like small baby snakes? And who is the hero from all the new songs sung in the Reach? It is not the queen or any of her servants, that much is clear. The bards name him the great and noble knight of broken hands… who sacrificed his life to steal the horn of the dragonlords, or who took Ice from Euron in a fight of giants, or told the wild scaled beasts to fly free… It all depends on which insipid songs you choose to listen to. That man, if he exists, must have the mastery over _two_ dragons now, not only one... If I could only list him on our side… The slavers would pay him handsomely in gold for all his trouble in securing the animals for them… I sent out the ravens asking for news, to such men as I trust to pay for their services, but none of them have returned. As if the buggering birds could tell who ordered their slaughter when we needed Lemore to burn…"

"The news from the Reach are just that, scant, my lord, and the songs are just that, songs… Not even Lord Mace knows for certain. His son and heir Ser Willas did not make it to the capital for the mummery. The movement of the enemy companies delayed his travel, before Euron supposedly accepted the peace terms. Only the mummers and the songs arrived from the south before the siege …. And the Dornish who rode _through_ the dead on their reckless horses…" the High Septon sighed, giving an account of things well known.

"Wouldn't this Elder Brother provide you with the knowledge we seek?"

"I'd rather not ask. He was different last time I saw him. More shrewd, less manse than the man I had known for years. Know this too, for it cannot harm me now: if I hadn't the wits and the means to arrange my election to this high office on time, it would have been him your ally, and he carrying the High Septon's crown. His standing among the voting septons had been way higher than mine. My ancient guts are churning, my lord. We should stop while we still can," some wisdom of the old age finally spoke through the mouth of the former wandering septon from the riverlands.

Come what may, it was not to last.

"We cannot stop at the threshold of victory…" verses proper of Lord Baelish started drawing castles in the attentive air, promising honour and glory. "I, the Lord of Winterfell! And you and your chosen Warrior's Sons wearing the High Septon's crown for all times!"

"You are right," the gnarled voice recomposed itself as fast as it had doubted. "I should stop being a coward. There is no turning back."

When the two men moved to the inside of the brothel from the secluded outdoor space where they talked, the night air convulsed in the shrubs. It tumbled with the gusts of a new wind, freshly come all over from the distant sea. Another figure crawled out from the inconspicuous greenery. Furiously, it leaped on the high fence of stone, and slid through the bars to the dirty street below with quaint ease, a mirthless creature of wicked life in death, as it was never meant to exist. The wind could not see her, so swift was she. But a red priest met her further down the street, not the one serving Lord Euron, hiding in the city, but the one who had once rode with Lord Beric Dondarrion, and his short lived Brotherhood Without Banners.

"My lady," Thoros of Myr said, "let me help you leave King's Landing before the guards catch up with us. They should not be lingering far …"

Hissing told him no one could help _her_ , or so his lady believed. _One mistake after another,_ her faded voice may have affirmed. _How I erred… My sweet innocent daughter…_

"Many people erred and even those who didn't died in the War of Five Kings," Thoros found the courage to oppose her. "Lady Sansa will see the truth of all your actions one day… No, I haven't seen anything about Lord Stark in my flames. Only this abandoned garden, the way leading to it, and a mortal foe of your late husband, meeting an enemy of R'hllor. I had no idea who they would be when I brought you here. The science of the fire is imprecise, as I have told you on many an occasion. Whatever has displeased you so, my lady, I am truly sorry for it."

Thoros of Myr followed his lady back to the plaza of the Great Sept of Baelor. On the way, Lady Stoneheart surrendered to the guards from whom they had escaped in the confusion of the day's fight. Most of the lords and smallfolk retired for the evening, but the prisoners of Daenerys Targaryen only huddled between the legs of her blessed forefather and waited for dawn, not causing any more distress to the their Unsullied keepers.

When the first rays of the rising sun showed on the horizon, a gurgle woke up the servant of the Lord of Light, who once again dared to offer new hope to his mistress. "No, my lady," Thoros disagreed. "Daenerys is the Dragon Queen. The flames favour her steps, as well as those of some others whose faces I have not been able to recognise. But the latest Lord of Harrenhal is not among them. If he suspected only the half of what I have seen, and if any of it will come to pass, he would have stayed in the riverlands."

"He would have never left his seat if he cherished his life."

**The sleeping girl**

The wolf woke up full of gnawing hunger where the girl could not. In the woods outside the city, lurking at the strange fleet where men were chained to oars and beaten up to row faster.

The healer with dark keen eyes was standing above the girl in the great sept where she was laid to rest by her stupid companion, strong as the boar who had killed the old drunk king his father years ago, after the hopeless rebellion of the silly krakens against the Silver Queen erupted. The eyes of the healer pleaded for _her_ help, for a help of a girl who could not help herself to wake up and see.

The wolf howled on the outside with unhindered emotion, for the intentions of the army it watched were not noble. But their ships were well guarded and the enemies too many. Its pack has not arrived yet from the riverlands.

The girl could not wake, and the wolf could not return to the city to help her. Her real sister, the one walking on two paws, should never know. She was nearby, and she was happy, the girl and the wolf both knew. Sansa… That was her name! She must have already cried for the loss of her younger sister, and she should not be forced to do it once more.

The dark eyes above the sleeping girl had the power to instill her some strength. She stirred and grasped the healer's hand, her grip harder than steel or stone. He wanted to retrieve it but he could not. And the girl marvelled at the heated sensation of an elongated hand, contrary to the icy touch she now possessed, cursed to lie like dead by the unforgiving god of the black and white, whose orders she had disobeyed.

Then again, there might have been hope still. The white part of the door to the temple of the merciless god, whom the girl had once sworn to serve, not knowing any better, had been made out of weirwood. And where weirwood was, the old gods were not far. They may yet protect the girl, and her sister, where no one else would. They were all they had left from their home, and their family, if the knives of his unfaithful brothers had found and pierced Jon's heart as the girl was dreaming before she found herself in the sept. She could see her own body from the outside, as stale air hovering over her own motionless form, and that of the tall healer trying to cure her. If the knives dug out Jon's heart, the two girls were the only ones left. The last members of an old family whose name she could not remember. And only one of them was truly awake.

The warm touch of the monk's hand against her flesh, whispered to the sleeping girl that it was not so. That she was mistaken. How, or why, she did not know, or he was not able to tell her. When he poured a healthily smelling drink in her parched lips, drop by drop, she slurped it expecting poison, most welcome to ease her imminent passing. Instead, she received a gift of an almost dreamless sleep. The older man did not know her, yet he cared for her as her father would have done. He showed her a love almost as great as the one the stupid bastard stag bore her, in his stubborn heart.

 _No featherbed for me!_ she sung merrily in her sleep, knowing that the day of her death was approaching with the end of the mummery, if she failed to find a hold strong enough to the world of the living things. The healing hands and the benign potion of the man of the Seven have nearly, nearly brought her back to life. But nearly had never been enough.

The wolf howled again, feasting on a meat of the horse it caught. The animal sailed across the high seas only to end up as a meal to the forest ruler of the far north. Direwolves multiplied behind the Wall, them, and the walkers and their blue-eyed slaves, just like the hair of mortal men and women grew longer, shinier and thicker with the arrival of winter.

The girl fought valiantly to open her eyes. But as much as she strove, her lids remained closed, and heavy. And the man who nearly helped her wake crouched helplessly next to her sleeping form, himself lacking in support she could have freely given.

_If only the old gods opened their blinded eyes, to see!_

**Mance**

Mance Rayder nervously pondered the odds to finish his play this time, and expose his plea in full. He was restless since his return to the capital, finding and hiring players, peasants, and props for the greatest song of his life.

 _After this I can run my own puppet show in Dorne,_ he thought, wondering why he had thought of Dorne of all places. For when the show ended, if he secured the help he came to seek, he would ride north. Only when the Long Night would be over, he would allow his heart to follow the way back south, and west, to the shores where the Citadel was, if it still stood by that time. By then, if he was still alive, he would be too old to go anywhere else, he reckoned, and much less to Dorne.

He stepped out on the stage before any of his players would, with the sun rising. The morning held a sign of an unspoken promise, and he abruptly decided to invent a short simple song to welcome Daenerys and Aegon, and everyone who patiently gathered one more time to see the mummery.

Mance Rayder hoped there was something of Aegon the Conqueror in both the rightful queen, and the Kingsguard bastard from Dorne. Who by the colour of his eyes and hair, and by the love that linked his parents, must have had more than a flare of Targaryen blood in his remote and forgotten ancestry. If Mance was wrong about the two of them, Westeros would sink to darkness, never to stand up again. The white walkers would rule a realm of wights made of cold flesh, and blackened blood crumbling into dust. Mance would burn before it came to that. But then Jon Snow would perish too, and so would Mance's son. In conjunction with so many others who deserved to live.

Baring his soul, Mance sang, wishing that he, the wildling, the man getting past the prime of his days, could wake up the bravery in the young kings and queens, could call all the three dragons together and send them far north before it was too late. _If we do not stand together, we will fall, my lords,_ he mocked the silk clad cowards who did not see their peril. If only he could open a way to the recklessness of youth in their fearful hearts!

Aegon and Daenerys were watching him closely. They were not the only ones. High Septon and Baelish watched him too, and Lord Tyrell, and Lord Frey, and the dark skinny envoys from Dorne, reminding him of his most recent sin. And the sleeping girl hidden behind the statue of Baelor, in arms of the once gutted lad who would play Robert Baratheon. And one of his mummers behind his back, but he could not tell which one, except that the regard of those eyes had been the most pungent of all. _The Hound,_ he thought, _that one still hates my songs._ He wondered if the uncouth man had already heard rhymes about his own deeds, spreading to the capital from the green slopes of the Reach, faster than a man could ride, or a raven fly.

Unburdened, Mance Rayder sang disrespectfully.

__A son of runaways from Valyria,_ _  
_ _

_Aegon flew from over the seas_

_On the wings of a black dragon,_

_His brother and his blood._

_His sisters have come along,_

_Those with snout and claws_

_And those with slender arms -_

_His women and his wives._

_xxx_

_For the dragons of old_

_Mated with each other_

_Afraid that they would change_

_Afraid of losing their force_

_Afraid that love would doom them_

_If passion led them astray._

_xxxxxx_

_Aegon flew to a realm of men_

_With no blood of his._

_And his siblings with claws_

_Had made him king._

_The dragons made him king_

_And his wives his queens_

_xxxxxxx_

_Torrhen then ruled the north._

_His blood was made of ice,_

_Of winter in his veins,_

_Of persisting against the tide._

_He knelt to the dragon_

_Not out of fear, nor out of spite;_

_The dragon had something_

_King Torrhen had not._

_The dragon had the fire_

_The terror of the cold_

_The doom of the enemy_

_From the untamed north_

_xxxxxxxx_

_Torrhen knelt and asked_

_Asked of Aegon the Conqueror_

_Asked of his sons and his daughters:_

_Remember the north!_

_When the cold winds blow,_

_When the white walkers wake,_

_When the Long Night comes._

_And Aegon just said: "Aye."_

_xxxxxxxx_

_Many seasons have passed._

_Aegon and his sisters were gone_

_All the dragons were dead_

_Or banished from the realm_

_When the evil in the north awoke_

_Rejoicing, safe and sound._

_xx_

_Hear, oh hear my story!_

_And tell me at the end_

_If King Torrhen knelt in vain_

_To the ruin of his lands!_

_xx_

_Hear, oh hear my story!_

_Of the last dragon_

_Of fire which burned to melt the ice_

_Of love between the two._

_xx_

_Hear, oh hear my story!_

_Of the lost dragon_

_Of the lost wolf_

_In whom Aegon and Torrhen stand united_

_In whose hands there may be hope._

_xx_

**Elder Brother**

In the depths of the Great Sept of Baelor, an apprentice pyromancer of Aerys II, a man now older than Lord Walder Frey, finished adjusting the lid of alchemists' glass to the jar of wildfire.

Wiping the excessive sweat from his wrinkled brow, he returned the armour breastplate to the Elder Brother, who would return to quietly observe his work whenever his role in the mummery so allowed. Mance and Jaime were lucky, or perhaps destined to find the old man, hiding in the sept itself, shuddering with unknown terror, unwilling to tell them truly what brought him there. Only one thing was certain, the man who once survived the murder of his king and his brothers in art by hiding in a dragon skull, had managed to avoid a mortal peril once again by the fine skill of endurance he must have been born with.

Mance embarked on showing his work. The mummery was going on very well from what the monk could conclude. The Elder Brother read through the first few appearances of Lord Eddard Stark with only a mild interest, eager to see the pyromancer successful in his efforts before he would devote any more attention to the play. It was the least he could do, and the sense of the responsibility for the danger he had carried to the sept overwhelmed all other considerations and curiosities.

Outside, Rhaegar and Lyanna were about to kiss for the first time in Raventree. The monk would soon need armour to pose as Ser Barristan Selmy, to be defeated by Rhaegar at the tourney in Harrenhal.

"Is it done?" he asked the pyromancer who reacted as if he had been stung by a snake to the first sound of his voice.

"It is, my lord, I mean, brother," the pyromancer took off the elaborate crystal gloves he needed to handle both the jar and the armour. His eyes turned large when the monk fastened the breastplate under his cloak without flinching, without even giving the piece of smith's work a second look.

"Aerys's metal cools down fast," the Elder Brother commented. "Feel for yourself."

"Oh, no my lord," the pyromancer excused himself, as one pierced by hard steel in the guts. The Elder Brother observed with curiosity the wrongness of the treatment he had been awarded once again, not corresponding to a man of the Faith. "I could not do that," the fire maester explained. "I would return to hiding now, if I may. My two younger brothers have been missing for a few days. Whatever destiny has befallen them, I would rather avoid it."

"Go ahead," the Elder Brother relieved the pyromancer of his duties and his worries, and readied himself to be unhorsed in a make-believe tourney.

**Sansa**

When Prince Rhaegar lay a crown of true blue roses, picked up fresh somewhere on the outskirts of King's Landing by the tireless hands of Mance Rayder, in the lap of Lady Lyanna, she stood up and brought the fragile blue petals of the thorny flowers to the softness of her lips.

Sansa never did that when they read the tourney scene for the first time in front of the melted walls of Harrenhal. Yet on the top of the stairs where her father had lost his life, it was the only thing she could do to respond to a warm gaze of the grey eyes in the slit of the helm they made Sandor wear over his face.

His ruined face which she now longed to explore in plain daylight, somewhere safe where no one would be watching.

She wished he would shiver under the touch of her lips on his scars, where the evening before he trembled only from the exploration of her hands. The puckered skin would be dry and harmless like the animal pelts the cloaks were made of in the north, she knew, yet it would give her immense joy to run her lips through it, for as long as he would let her. She wouldn't spare the warm part of his face, and she suspected she would then tangle her hands in the softness of his long hair. To gather courage and continue leaving a trail of her lips on his neck, and further down his large body, which she wanted to see fully uncovered, washed in light, all the way to the most unladylike place of all that she had never dared to look upon, yet.

Sansa felt her cheeks colour as they rarely did of late, and the eyes of the crowd devouring the image offered by her masked face.

Lady Lyanna was back, and her armour of ice was cracking for all to see. She pressed her lips tighter to the blue of the flowers, before she lowered the wreath to her pounding heart. Prince Rhaegar and Lady Lyanna looked at each other as if their love could tear down the Wall, and the multitude was stunned. Princess Elia, looking strangely toothless, as did the young lady who posed like Rhaegar's first wife, fainted masterfully while the people uttered a collective sigh. Ser Daven approved from the back, buried in parchments he required as a prompter.

Aerys II urged Ser Barristan Selmy with a look of madness in his purple eyes to find him the mystery knight, whom he hated and admired in equal parts. Soon, real Rhaegar saved Lyanna from his father's mercenary wearing the prince's armour, even if Sansa's aunt did not yet know the truth. Sansa was swept off the ground, bent over a powerful shoulder of the man she loved like a sack of grain, regretting like a spoiled child that the path on which she was to be carried could not be any longer. In the Hall of Lamps, where they had to wait with the other mummers not employed at that moment, Sandor Clegane lowered her down, to a distance allowing for some modesty, yet not quite letting her go.

"Did that hurt you?" he asked flatly but she knew better than to believe his indifference.

Sansa shook her head. Making a half turn, she leaned back into his body, innocently allowing both of his arms to support her waist, so that they could both witness the scene Sansa had never seen before, of Ser Arthur Dayne coming home to his sister, Lady Ashara.

His arms tensed when he whispered, "Little bird."

She smiled and settled as deep as she could in his embrace, easing his insecurity with tiny gestures of affection and the slightest of touches she could spare him when they were not alone, guiding his hands a bit up, to the beginning of her breasts, where they fitted better than any lace or ribbon ever did.

She loved the way he didn't take her for granted, the way he didn't take her as a prize he deserved, for either his crimes, his noble deeds or his ancestry, or any other nonsense she had heard when the high lords pleaded for her hand. She loved how he welcomed every favour of hers he had been given, as if he had no right to any of it, yet he desired it anyway.

Maybe, if Sansa knelt before Daenerys when the show was over, the Silver Queen would understand that there was only one man Sansa could possibly marry.

Until then, and after, no matter what, she would love him anyway.

**Daenerys**

Daenerys did not know what to think of the supplication of the late Catelyn Stark. Unhinged, the shadow of a woman sprang in front of her, barring the queen's way to her seat of honour in front of the Great Sept of Baelor, with some love for her lady daughter suddenly rekindled in her undying heart of stone. _And then they claim my father was a madman,_ she thought, bidding Drogon in her mind, and the Unsullied in her voice to shut up the braying of the Lady Stoneheart in any way they knew how. It was just as she had said to Lord Frey, no more no less; all unimportant things would have to wait until the end of the mummery.

The Dragon Queen was even more confused by the play she had seen so far. She was convinced that her brother Rhaegar died for the woman he loved although the kingdoms or the Usurper may have believed differently. It was one of the few certainties she possessed about her own family, and Ser Barristan never dissuaded her, despite using every occasion to talk to her about the less pleasing features of the other members of her family, starting with her late father. But if Daenerys was to believe the northern singer, then the young Usurper loved Lady Lyanna too, and he acted out of honour, or misconception, when he started and led the Rebellion. None of the two things she could in good faith consider a crime. Than there was the blond knight playing Rhaegar's most loyal companion, the one whose real name she did not learn but whom she remembered all too well; they met at the lake at Harrenhal, and he reminded her strongly of the only brother she had known, Viserys. The golden knight then directed her own words at her, without knowing they were hers; he had never heard her pronouncing them. _If I look back, I am lost,_ he said. And weeks after, he was the one taken by Viserion through the dark clouds above Highgarden when Daenerys feared for her own life and the life of her children far more than she ever did, should the repulsive kraken see through the base treachery of his priest and succeed in mastering the horn of the dragonlords.

 _Hopefully all this is nothing more than a mummers' farce,_ she thought. _The right decisions would come smoother, then._ Things, however, had a way of their own, and most of them did not come easy in her life. Witnessing the confession of Mance Rayder at the henchman's block in Harrenhal, and the capture of the horn in Highgarden, Daenerys was certain. The mummers were much more than they seemed. Mere waiting for their play to start filled her own heart with dreadful expectation of feats yet unknown. Of secrets to be uncovered, shaking the foundations of what she believed in.

When Ser Arthur Dayne greeted his sister, Lady Ashara, Daenerys did not understand what meaning the two siblings could have for a song about her noble brother and his love. She noticed Aegon stiffen in the place next to her own. The disgusting squid was tied up in the crow cage hung high up from the stony hands of Baelor the Blessed. It was a good place as any for a man called the Crow's Eye by his own bannermen. Her cherished young prisoner kept dreaming under Baelor's feet in company of one of the mummers. And her ward, her lady ward whom she intended to honour with marriage, became cold and distant in face of her attempt. It would seem that Viserys' lessons from her childhood, on _traitor_ Starks and Tullys marrying for alliance and duty, first and foremost, were not as accurate. Lady Sansa only had eyes for her sun and stars under the white mask, bluer than the sky over Braavos, when the summer was still untouched by the sorrows of the beggar queen who had to leave the only home she had ever known.

"Aegon!" Daenerys finally heard the whispers, unstoppable, and overwhelming. The shouts. The yelps. The cries. "A bastard of Ser Arthur Dayne and his sister! And Septa Lemore is his mother! Aegon! Aegon! Liar! Turncloak!"

"Imagine only!" she could hear Lord Baelish cry out in outrage, speaking louder than the rest of the unsatisfied voices. "He has misled us with his writings to sentence his own mother to death! To conceal his true identity and remain king!"

In the next moment Lord Baelish was prostrated under the queen's feet, begging her to honour him for revealing the conspiracy against her, counselling her to imprison and execute Aegon for motherslaying… Asking again for the hand of the Lady Sansa as a just reward.

Yet, lost when looking back or not, Queen Daenerys had heard the mummers, and she had heard them well. Too well. _Rhaegar_ had taken baby Aegon as his own.

And if Aegon _knew_ he was not Rhaegar's son… Everything changed in the queen's eyes but not in the way the multitude intended. The young man she could never trust before, for both she and Drogon knew he was no dragon, defended her with his life for all he knew. Aegon could not know, had no way of knowing, that Drogon would have burned Euron alive if no one came to his mother's aid. Just like he burned Gregor Clegane in Highgarden for what he did to Princess Elia. And there was also a possibility that Daenerys could have died if Drogon's flames were a second too late falling from the sky.

 _Rhaegar took Aegon as his own_ , Daenerys repeated in her mind. It was one more reason very hard to ignore, in favour of acting against her own preconceptions. She looked back where deep in the jeering crowd a woman was hiding. The woman Drogon had brought back from the nest of the eagles deep in the mountains above the Vale, the one Baelish claimed had been Aegon's mother. But she only stared bluntly forward. Septa Lemore's stern gaze turned dark purple, almost charred black, as she mercilessly studied Daenerys's face, judging what her reaction was going to be. As she watched what the trueborn daughter of the House Targaryen would do against the pretender on the Iron Throne.

And Daenerys understood.

How could she, a child of a brother and sister, condemn any other fruit of such union? How could Rhaegar? Especially if all the rumours of the proclivities of the Targaryens in spreading little bastards here and there in the realm were true even in part. Who could measure how much dragon blood ran in lesser lords and where it would create the true love between brothers and sisters? The dragon blood ran strong and it took its toll, it was known. Daenerys found she could not judge Ser Arthur and Lady Ashara, and much less Aegon, if he were indeed their child.

"Kingslayer!" someone shouted rudely from the ranks far away from the players. Someone wearing a shiny sword of a Warrior's Son. "Fucking your sister in life, and in the play!"

And so it was revealed to Daenerys at last who the blond knight was, and her blood stopped flaming in her veins. For unlike Aegon, who was never a dragon, her father's _murderer_ had been saved by a dragon… By a child of her own. And Viserion must have known it all along in his large unclear mind, yet he chose to carry away that man among all the others…. She remembered how Euron called for the Kingslayer to come forth in Highgarden, but Daenerys was so distressed at the time that she did not grasp the kraken's meaning…

 _What will the mummery still show?_ she thought, eager for the play to end, regretting how she forced the singer's hand to win the horn. Yet if she did not, she would have been enslaved with Drogon, and no one would have helped her until the end of her time.

Baelish was still talking, but she could not hear him. She turned to Aegon, the bastard of the forbidden love between brother and sister, not guilty of the sins of his fathers, just like she would not appreciate to be judged and sentenced for the way her father had killed the Starks, rightfully fearing their treason, or not.

"Nephew," she called him, and meant it for the first time, for all the realm to hear. "If my late brother took you as his son, I will honour his choice. You are my nephew as much as if you were Rhaegar's and Elia's descendant in flesh and blood."

In a poor imitation of Lord Baelish's most gallant courtesy, Aegon fell to his knees next to the hem of the queen's elaborate yellow dress, made of the softest silks that Meereen could give. Humbled, he started to speak.

"I do not deserve your pardon, Your Grace," he said. "I am still a kinslayer, by rights," he stuttered. "My real mother… She… I… You did right in not letting me see her, if she still lives at all!"

Daenerys took him by the shoulders before he could make his thoughts more plain for the bloodthirsty body of the people. Flustered, she hushed him with her hands. She pushed him gently, wordlessly, to the custody of Lady Jeyne, seated at Aegon's left.

"Beloved nephew," she croaked, hoping her shrill voice of a dragonlady she had become would not sound too frightening. She was an abomination too, a bigger one than Lady Jeyne, Lady Catelyn, or even Lord Euron. She was too profoundly disturbed to pretend to be the young girl everyone believed her to be, revealing her true nature of the beast, if only at that moment. "We will discuss all family matters _in private,_ after the mummery."

"Lord Baelish," she turned to the thin lord who kept asking for favours, just like so many others who would never have unsheathed their steel in her defence. _Even the despicable lord of the krakens, robber of my children, has more daring,_ she knew, hating profoundly the necessity for the queen to have councillors and husbands. Regaining her semblance of innocence with great inward pain, she said, "I thank you for your valuable counsel, my lord, this time, and all the times before. I can assure you that it will not go unnoticed. Let us discuss your just reward and the business of the kingdoms in peace when all the songs are over."

Content that her words made everyone quiet, Daenerys looked back to the stage in the state of sheer apprehension she had never experienced before. The northern singer stood in front of his players, protecting the Kingslayer with his sacred white cloak from morsels of food and rotten turnips tossed his way by the angry watchers. Maybe she had imagined it, or the wildling sent a nod of proud approval her way. A greeting of equals; a gesture of a king in his own right to one he deemed worth of being a queen. The Mother of Dragons responded with a tiny acknowledgement of her own, with newly found respect for the wild man and the fruits of his visions as a bard, where all the world had to offer was fire, and more blood than even her noble sigil could contain, without bursting into death and nothingness first.

Daenerys Stormborn was Aerys' daughter, no one could ever deny that, and the seed of madness was planted within her from the day of her birth. But that was not all. For just as Ser Barristan had predicted, when he swore her his allegiance, his service, and his sword, she was much more than that.

Daenerys was the dragonlady Moqorro must have seen in his flames in Highgarden, mistaking her for a dragonlord.

And Daenerys was Rhaegar's sister.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to guests leaving a kudos on last chapter.  
> Thank you for comments.  
> I hope this part was not that bad.


	47. The House Stark and the House Dayne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the mummery starts writing itself further

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And where you all start to understand why the word "crack" proudly figures in the description of this story from the very beginning

**Sandor**

_Others take me,_ Sandor Clegane cursed in silence, _but_ _I don't_ _want to die at all, not now, not any more, not even in the bloody mummery._ If there was a witchcraft for that, he would have given good coin for it. _A golden dragon for a gift of life_ , he laughed at the stupid thought, _and there has never been a fool larger than me…_

He, who stayed alive mostly by despising either life or death, now thought, with unmeasured embarrassment, that it might prove _unlucky_ to _pretend_ to die. Smothering an enemy with bare hands might have relieved the tension, but he was among the very few men he almost respected, so there was no way he could resort to such simplicities.

He was to step out on the stairs of the Great Sept of Baelor, carrying a thin shiny sword as he would never wear in life. There waited an overgrown boy walking on high woman's shoes of foreign making, whose shoulders were enhanced by pieces of armour way too big for him, to make them appear as broad as the Hound's. The boy would then hit him in a chest with a warhammer, sending it to irreparable ruin. But only after Sandor Clegane had said his piece, a composition he never bothered to read, a frenzy of fresh lines blackening a rather long piece of implacable parchment like soft spilling cat shit.

Mayhaps he would just die of shame amidst the cheering of the crowd, before the ridiculous blow found him.

"I'm not going," he announced his decision, craven or not, to three pair of eyes, one black, one brown, and one blue that made him weak. "How about I just walk on my knees as you do, Mance, when you pretend to be Howland Reed? Here, I could stagger over the stage and fall down the stairs. Then Gendry can come out and boast with his hammer, pretending he finished me off. No need for me saying any more nonsense."

No one answered. He snorted, with intention to leave, all songs be damned.

Three pairs of eyes moved in unspoken agreement, black, brown and blue, barring his way in the Hall of Lamps.

Sansa spoke first.

"Please," she said, "it may soften the heart of the queen to remember how her brother died for love. Prince Rhaegar must have been desperate if he rode on purpose to meet his death."

 _How will that help you, little bird?_ the Hound thought, brooding. _How will that help me? A dog will remain a dog, and a dragon most assuredly a dragon. If the queen is of the rare sort who keeps their promises, I will have her protect you. Let you choose a handsome prince you dream of as your husband when you wake up from your folly and get tired of me. And if she isn't, we can all just as well fart instead of reading. It might amuse the queen or her dragon all the more, who knows._

"Haven't you ever desired to die?" Mance tried his own way of convincing. "I find that most people did. Think of that moment, say the words! Before you know, your part in the mummery will be over. What are a few more words now that you've already spoken so many?"

It didn't work. The Hound caught himself wondering with sick curiosity what the Elder Brother would say next. Inside, his reasons were set in stone. It was not the humiliation of a powerful man at arms admitting defeat. It was a mindless fear that if he died in the show, he might die in the world. Now that he intended to live for as long as Sansa would have him.

"Let me talk to him alone," the Elder Brother said warily. "The wisdom of the Seven is sometimes best taught in the solitude of the spirit.

Sansa, as it was only proper for a lady she was _,_ had to obey the demands of the Faith, taking the bloody singer with her to a respectable distance.

Left alone with the monk, the Hound waited, unconcerned, more impassive than ever, for some new idiocy the Elder Brothed would rain on him from the high dais of his too many noble beliefs.

The monk paced the cramped space where they were briefly alone, and the others could not hear them clearly. When he faced the Hound, his dark eyes were feverish, tense. But it was his words that hit hard, somewhere in the softened part of his guts where Sandor Clegane was no longer a man, but merely a servant of a woman.

"Wouldn't you die, brother," the Elder Brother said with fervour, "for a woman you loved?

"Wouldn't you die for her, brother?" the monk went on with the same zeal as if he had just thought of a new hymn to honour his gods. "If you believed that by your death she could prosper, flower, be safe?"

"Wouldn't you die for her, if only to let her breathe? To let her have a different man, someone not tainted by madness and gloomy past of his house like Rhaegar must have been? For you could not stand if she did it while your own blood still ran warm in your veins …"

"Well, now, brother," the Hound mocked the monk to mask his true thoughts on the matter. "Shall I get you a lute? You sound as if you've just started making some gibberish rhymes of your own."

"And what if I did?" the monk joked back, calmed by his brother's cruel response, as if he expected no less. "So far away from the Quiet Isle, what else is there to do? One day I'll ask you to fetch me a high harp. Who knows, I may yet teach you how to play. When the Trident washed me out after the battle, it had also brought forth my broken weapons, and two loose harp strings… I've never told you that, haven't I? I've never told anyone out of shame… I never tried playing it, and now I believe that I should have…"

It was too much for the Hound. He stopped listening to the Elder Brother's oddities and gave a furtive look to Sansa, several steps away. He would die for her ten times over if needs be. _Bugger it all,_ he thought. _Shit out the words and go back to her, she might caress you for it. She will chirp how well you read, and you will kiss her and believe every silly thing she says..._

"I never asked you to do anything for me, and to put it in your words, you don't own me a _buggering_ thing," the Elder Brother begged for his brother's attention. "Yet I am asking you now. Please, would you say your part? The old stories gladden my soul, thirsty for knowledge. I long to see how Mance sees the end of this, more than anything else."

The Hound gave a puzzled look to the Elder Brother. The dog suddenly smelled a lie where there had never been one. All that there had been was the peace of the Seven. And now there was a badly hidden desire of a rarely decent man for Sandor Clegane to do his bidding. Of a man he _almost_ considered as his true older brother, the one who generously saved his life when he had found him dying against a tree. Before they saved each other from the white walkers. Before the Hound pushed the Elder Brother out of the way of a malicious arrow searching for the innocent man's heart in the Riverlands. The Hound had turned to protecting him by an instinct of a sworn shield, not knowing anything else to do, as if the hopelessly honest creature sworn to the Seven had been his true King.

"Piss on that, brother" he said, changing his mind, faster than he could change his stance in a duel. " _You_ don't need to beg me for anything. If you so want it, I'd do it anyway."

In several huge steps the Hound grabbed the parchment from Mance's hands, and gave a brief look to his last words in the show, the ones he never bothered to read beforehand even if the wildling stubbornly insinuated he should do so. His brow furrowed while reading, to better remember the simpering stuff. With the same determination he would feel before a battle, he wrinkled the parchment and tossed it away, re-fitting the white mask on his ugly face.

It was time. He emptied his head by the force of his will and walked.

xxxxxxxx

Prince Rhaegar came to the stage alone, limping on one of his long legs, as a man suffering from an old wound in the dampness of an autumn morning. He used a too short glittering sword as a stick to support his strong body from falling.

"Lyanna wants Arthur," he rasped with poise, and terrible pain. "She wants the Sword of the Morning. And she wanted Lewyn Martell before she ever wanted me. Lewyn would not lie, would he? He _is_ my Kingsguard. I trust them more than I trust my father. More than I believe in myself. What is more, he's Dornish, like Arthur, they tell each other everything."

"How I wish I could close my eyes and go to sleep, sooner, faster..."

"Before this day is over."

"If I were a man like my father, I would take my revenge. But how can I, Lyanna? You may have loved me, if only for a while. It was more than I ever hoped to have. It is not your fault if your devotion veered to a better man. Have him, Lyanna, be his... The Mad Prince will not disturb you any longer; with his weaknesses... his faith in old prophecies… or his sad verses on a harp you claimed you loved so dearly."

"Oh, father, if you knew that your heir would die from Lewyn's honest words, you would never have sent the Dornish to Trident!"

"But how sweet it was, how blissful, the last few moons of my miserable life. I will not be able to forget it, Lyanna, know it, not even in my death... "

Rhaegar lifted a sword, but his heart was not in it, although the horrible words he spoke next flowed more naturally behind the white mask than the weak plea that preceded them. "Robert!" he screamed in a broken voice. "It was sweet to rape your betrothed! Won't you take your revenge? Or shall I cut you down and rape her again as much as it pleases me until she is no longer pretty and I let my father _burn_ her, like her father and her eldest brother before her?"

The broad-shouldered youth approached the Prince of Dragonstone from the back. Rhaegar turned to face him, deeply relieved that the time to speak was over. The part that came next he could do better.

The sword clashed with the warhammer, in a dance, of sorts. For a short while, no one prevailed. Until Rhaegar tossed his head backwards and laughed, as one shaken by the great folly of the moment. The warhammer found his chest, shattering the black armour. There were no rubies to spring from it in the mummery. Rhaegar fell, and a flood of hair, too black to belong to a dragon, spread wildly on the stone steps from under the weirwood disguise he wore.

Robert Baratheon stood above his dead enemy, livid of face, heaving. "Send a raven to Ned Stark!" he commanded the crowd, as if they were his maesters, his followers, and his loyal bannermen. "Tell him of my victory. And should he find his sister with life, tell him I will still wed her, maiden or not. For me she will always be a lady, and never a Targaryen whore. The future Queen of the Seven Kingdoms."

"And him, him..." Robert threatened his dead enemy. "Him I will burn! Let us build a pyre such as the kingdoms have never seen! Let the dust of the Targaryen scum fly in the air, without any mercy from the gods, old or new. I would give him to Ned's tree god if I could! If the trees only had the power to devour their foes! If only they could have protected you, Lyanna…"

Baratheon's victorious roaring turned to helpless sobs when Sandor Clegane felt the blessing of his body being pulled off the stage. Patiently, he waited until he would no longer be visible. As soon as it was the case, he was on his feet, and with Sansa, staring intently at the last parchment of her own. She looked very pale, and her hands were restless.

"The final hours and the last words of my aunt were so horrible," she said. "I lack the strength to pronounce them. At least she didn't know that her husband died believing she had betrayed him. How could Prince Lewyn say a thing like that of her?"

"I told you once they were all liars here. Why should Prince Lewyn be any different?" the Hound mumbled, needing to offer her some consolation, as he wanted to do so many times in Joffrey's court and never quite dared, except in futile gestures. Dabbing the blood from her lip when others would hit her, or tossing his cloak at her half-naked figure only on someone else's orders. "At least your death will appear more beautiful than mine" he said like a fool, spying on a few words on her parchment. "Imagine, a bed of blood! That sounds almost worthy of the songs you have in your pretty head."

He had been spilling shit through the ruin of his lips, and he would gladly spill much more of it if it meant another of her half smiles.

"Let us watch the battle first," she said, somewhat calmed down. "My Father came with six other northern lords to the Tower of Joy. They were to attack three greatest knights of Prince Rhaegar's Kingsguard, and to save my aunt, for King Robert. Only he and Lord Reed lived... He wouldn't tell of it, not even to my Mother. Once, I overheard him briefly describing the battle to Maester Luwyn. My sister Arya and me did. Arya, she hid in his chambers to avoid Septa Mordane's lessons, and I was looking for her to bring her back before Mother would notice. When Father came in, we were both afraid and we hid in his solar. I had barely seen nine name days, then. Neither of us understood much at the time. But now I remember, and I do. He didn't want to kill those men, yet he had to. _It was his duty_ , no matter what you think of it. I don't think he shared the entire truth of it with the maester either. And by the sound of it, what he did then must have been haunting him to the end of his days."

**Mance**

"I am rather glad that I am not to speak my last words in this song as a lady, but rather draw them out with a sword," Lady Brienne told Mance while she was waiting to play the last battle scene, "although I am now a lady in truth." She gazed at her husband when she said that.

"Lady Lannister," Jaime called her in mocking, but she didn't seem to mind.

Ser Daven wore a white armour too, reliving the ghost of Ser Oswell Whent, the third Kingsguard who guarded Lady Lyanna and died on that day. He stepped on the stage after Brienne and Jaime, eager for a task other than prompting.

From the opposite side of the stage, Blackwood, Corbray, and three peasants from Pennytree, the same ones Lady Lyanna unhorsed at the tourney in Harrenhal, walked like shadows behind Ned Stark and Howland Reed, to face the Kingsguard and fill in the number of the six northern knights who followed Lord Eddard to the Tower of Joy.

"And so it begins," Ser Arthur said.

"No," said Ned Stark, in the saddest voice Mance has ever heard from the Elder Brother. "So it ends."

With her features of a woman well hidden in the largest one of three precious white sets of armour, miraculously retrieved by the Elder Brother from the bowels of the Red Keep before the mummery, Lady Brienne appeared every inch as the famous White Bull, Lord Commander of Aerys' Kingsguard, Ser Gerold Hightower. She led the onslaught of the Kingsguard with unmatched fierceness, and only succumbed to blows of Lord Stark because the parchment said she should do so after a while.

Soon, the stage was strewn with living men and one woman playing corpses. Only three men were left standing.

"Which one of you shall I kill first?" Ser Arthur Dayne said with coldness in his voice. Ser Jaime took off his helm and blond curls washed over his face, as handsome as Dayne's once was. And a greatsword that should have been held in both hands, in a tale Lord Reed weaved for Mance Rayder deep in the hidden sanctuary of the Greywater Watch, was now held by only one. But the decision and the courage of the golden knight matched Dayne's own, or so Mance Rayder firmly believed when he chose him for the role. First time he saw him the Kingslayer a prisoner, the man was about to step into the fire before it would reach his lady. Courage was the most important feature of Arthur Dayne, and only then the love he had for his sister.

"None of you will pass any further," Dayne said. "You are fools if you believe otherwise."

"I had a dream, Ser Arthur, and that dream of mine was green," Mance Rayder intoned the words of Howland Reed, stepping between Ned Stark and Arthur Dayne, in a realm where the Northman's imagination and his visions of the past became one with the truth of three very different men playing it. His knees ached from walking on them to appear short enough, but he would go on as long as necessary.

"In this dream of mine," Lord Reed continued, "Ser Gregor, whom they call the Mountain, butchered Princess Elia and her two children, Rhaenys and Aegon, when Lord Tywin conquered the capital… I had this dream, and then, it came true… "

"Stark," Dayne asked curtly, as one more highborn than Reed, "your lizard lion is lying, isn't he? On your honour as a Stark?"

"I wish he were," Ned Stark said. "The Iron Throne Robert sat on is covered with blood of Rhaegar's children. And I will not stay close to it. I intend to return north as soon as I fulfil my duty to my House and my only sister. _She_ sent me a raven after Rhaegar's defeat. _She_ told me where she was, pleading for help."

"My dreams are often green, my lord," Reed repeated, leaning on a dwarf's lance Sansa had brought from Harrenhal, to easier support his ordeal of kneeling. "And the green dreams do not lie."

"If you knew the truth," Dayne said with righteous anger, "you wouldn't be standing here with your liege lord, both of you rabid like the Usurper's dogs."

"More likely, his wolves," Stark had said, profoundly disturbed by the mention of dogs and how it equalled him to Gregor Clegane, according to Reed. The notion seemingly offended the Elder Brother too. Thin of face, he lifted a sword.

"You mean to say, my lord, that had we known the truth," Mance's voice quivered, but his knees stood firmly between the two foes, "we would be here as you are, to help our rightful queen." Whoever struck first, he'd have to cut through Reed to reach the last enemy standing. 

Dayne hesitated, and Stark turned impatient. "Howland, by the old gods, step aside! You've never told _me, your liege lord,_ of any of those dreams of yours."

"No, Lord Stark," Reed said formally. "I owe you my fealty, not my dreams."

"And I have kept silent about them for you were in them too. You learned the truth on a field full of our dead brethren, a field much like this one, under the high tower made of stone. All good men and true, the champions, and the defeated. With great Ser Gerold Hightower, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, fallen lifeless in front of your feet, a victim of Ice, a sword of your forefathers wielded by you, a young lord who thought he was bringing the just fury of the north to the farthest south. You are my lord, and you surpass me in station and stature, but I am still wiser than you if wisdom can be counted in a number of the name days. Another reason I did not speak of my dream is that it was the very first green dream I ever had, and it saddened my heart in so great a measure that I kept hoping it was a lie, and that I did not inherit the gift of greensight from my forefathers. But, alas, here I stand with you, my lord, and I see every awful image of it as true in front of my weary eyes."

"Howland," Stark said, "in the name of our friendship I will let you speak. But rest assured that when you are finished, I will still do my duty."

"I would expect no less from you, my lord," Reed said, small, wiry of body, entirely fearless and almost untouched by age as Mance remembered him, ruling in the green haze of his ever moving seat, never to be found by mortal men if the lord of the marshes did not wish to be discovered.

"Tell me, Ser Arthur," the lizard lion spoke. "Was it not Ser Gerold's older brother who kidnapped Lady Lyanna on orders of King Aerys, and not Rhaegar? Was that not the reason that the Lord Commander stayed here and honoured his sacred vow to protect the rightful king and queen with his life? To pay a debt for the crime his own brother attempted on royal command? Was my dream a lie? Tell me, Ser Arthur. For the good of the realm, I bid you speak."

"But then," Lord Stark sounded slightly shaken behind Reed's back, "Lyanna would have been Rhaegar's wife, and with the death of her husband, our rightful queen."

"So she is," Ser Arthur agreed. "Your sister is Rhaegar's lawful wife, and our queen. I swear it on my honour as a Dayne. I haven't soiled the ancestral sword I carry by a single deed, and I will not do so by lying to you now."

"But then," it was time for Lord Stark to stutter, "my duty is to lay down my sword and die! Robert has won and I have sworn my sword to him. You have to take Lyanna over the seas. It's the only way."

Eddard Stark lowered his sword and knelt as he would, years later, and then by force, for his executioner Ser Ilyn Payne, on the same stairs of the Great Sept of Baelor. Reed stepped aside, letting the two men face each other.

Ser Arthur disagreed, lowering his own sword.

Mance Rayder dreamed how many years ago Dayne's blade colour of milkglass, now resting in hands of his only son and heir staring mutely at the mummery, joined in mutual surrender the blade of winter, rippling with the dark grey colour of old thick ice, the kind that did not melt easily in the north Mance cherished so well. Reed, real Reed had been shocked. "It had been the greatest trial of my life," he had told Mance. "And nothing has ever equalled it, after or before."

"No, Lord Stark," Ser Arthur said. "Rhaegar has lost the war. How far can I go before the Usurper's knives find us? Find me? Find your sister? And I… I have a sister too. If I die, the Usurper may well let her live. You have to take my life and go to your sister. You have to do it now before it is too late. She is… delicate. You will see the reason for it yourself. Listen to her. Save her. Hide her until such time that is right. You have the power to do that in that frozen land of yours no one ever comes to visit. Rhaegar had fallen in love with that land and with its lady. I wish I accompanied him when he went north, if only to see if the Wall was as high as the bards in Dorne sing, but now, it is too late for that as well."

"I will not take your life," Lord Stark said.

"Please," Ser Arthur begged. "If you do not fight me, and win, my sworn duty of the Kingsguard will force me to take yours, and then, surely, everything will be lost. Please, for the love you must bear your sister!"

"My duty is to die, Ser Arthur," Stark said calmly. "Now that I have learned the truth. A Stark can never forsake his honour. Lyanna, sweet sister! Why didn't you confide in me before? Why didn't you send a raven before it was too late?"

When Ser Arthur slowly took up his milk-coloured blade once again in a single shaky hand, Lord Reed regretted with all his might that the green dreams never lied. For everything had come to pass exactly as he had dreamed. He dreamed about that moment since he was a child. Before he had any understanding of what he saw, of what he would choose to do, night after night. He saw how the decision would be his, and his alone, of a minor lord of a lesser house, owner of the old gift of the children of the forest.

The dream told him that all the deaths on that day in Dorne, all the lives given in the Rebellion, all would be pointless and all for nothing. If he, Howland Reed, did not find the courage to kill cowardly, to slaughter by surprise one good man who did not deserve to die. And if he could commit that heinous crime, one day, maybe, if many other things not depending on him would also come to pass, the rightful king would come back to his throne, and defeat the Long Night, setting the world back to what it should be.

"Please, Lord Stark," Ser Arthur supplicated further. "Stand up and fight!" He drew Dawn as slowly as he could, but his opponent's face and calm grey eyes were made of dull ice, his blade on the warm soil of Dorne, abandoned, untouched.

Reed swallowed his tears.

He swallowed his doubts and buried his short lance in the neck of Ser Arthur's Dayne, in the soft portion of flesh too weakly protected by the white armour of the Kingsguard. He did not do it in a fair fight; he did it as a villain and as a traitor when the Sword of the Morning was not watching.

"Howland!" Lord Stark screamed at him, not believing his eyes. "What have you done?"

"What is done, is done now," Lord Reed said. "Go to your sister, my lord. There's nothing you can do here."

Ser Arthur Dayne lay dying on the warm soil of Dorne, and Lord Howland Read took his head to ease his passing. Then, years ago, the dying knight opened his darkened eyes and confessed a secret, of his love for Ashara, and of little Aegon, butchered, being their son. But that part was not shown in the mummery, not in that place, not as it happened. For Mance Rayder honoured a promise made to Lord Reed in the depths of Greywater Watch. That the last moments of weakness of the great knight would not be a thing for the crowd laughing, maidens fainting, and the players in the game of thrones opening their mouth. No one would ever know how Howland Reed found out one of the best kept secrets in Seven Kingdoms, a thing not even he had ever dreamed about. Reed told it only to Mance Rayder of all living people, not even to Lord Stark, his friend, whose secret he had also kept for many years.

"Why tell me?" Mance had asked in Greywater's Watch, humbled by the magnitude of knowledge and trust bestowed on him, a wildling travelling south.

"I had a dream," Lord Reed had said.

"And your dream was green," Mance finished his thought, not daring to elaborate further. When Mance mentioned he would wish to write a song about Rhaegar and Lyanna, the only thing Howland Reed asked for, in exchange for everything he had told Mance, was that if anyone would ever speak the part of Howland Reed in that song, it should be Mance himself.

And Mance knew that Howland Reed must have dreamed as well of the King-beyond-the-Wall's biggest regret, the crime he committed against the gods. He could not do differently if he wanted to keep the respect of his people, and any chances they had at that time to survive the winter. Mance Rayder and Howland Reed shared the pain of killing a good man, in exchange for a distant hope of better times. Times that were only possible, and never promised. Times that may never come to pass.

Mance Rayder had killed Benjen Stark by his own hand, when his men have captured him ranging beyond the Wall in a mockery of a trial by combat provoked by the least worthy among his men, the Lord of Bones, whose flesh later on fed the flames of Rh'llor much to Mance's liking. He never found the courage to tell Jon about it, and he could only imagine how Lady Sansa would react if she had known the truth.

 _My confession will not bring back the dead,_ he thought, yet the urge to tell everyone about it grew, as if only by doing it he would set his heart at ease.

The wildling's reverie ended when Ser Daven gestured violently to the confused leader of the mummers to clear the scene, and move to the next one, the last one before Mance would dare to make his demand to Daenerys.

The scene where Lady Lyanna would die, and Jon would live.

**Sansa**

"Ned," Lyanna Stark said to her brother played by a monk whose head was wrapped in red, laying on a bed of crimson silks found somewhere in the Great Sept of Baelor, while Ser Jaime had been ironically commenting how they were all lucky that the Lannister colours stopped being fashionable at court.

"Lyanna," the man sighed, "is it true?"

"What, Ned?" Sansa said, making her voice sound weak.

"Did you love him?" Lord Stark asked as though that were the most important question a brother could ask a sister on her dying bed. "Did he respect you? Did he make you his queen?"

"He made me his wife, Ned," Lyanna had said. "That is more than being a queen. He earned my love by never asking for it. I wish you could have truly met him, Ned. I wish father and Brandon and Benjen did too."

Lady Lyanna Stark closed her eyes, immaculately pale on her bed of blood.

"Promise me, Ned," she begged her brother with her eyes still closed.

"Promise you what?" he asked, not knowing, not understanding.

"When I go, Ned… In a chamber next to this one, you will find our son with his wet nurse. Tell everyone he is yours. Protect him. Let him grow strong…" Lyanna looked at her brother one last time, wishing her gaze stern, more powerful than death running in her veins.

"Your son? But then he is… He has a claim to the Iron Throne! Stronger than Robert or anyone else!"

"Ned," Lyanna said. "He's only a boy. Let him be a boy, grow up as a boy. Tell him, when he's old enough to take it, that both of his parents loved him. Tell him, when it's safe, tell him who he is."

"You will tell him yourself," Ned insisted. "I will take you back to Winterfell, and hide you both from Robert."

"It is too late for that, Ned," Lady Stark said. "By the time I wrote to you where I was, against the wishes of the Kingsguard protecting me, Rhaegar was dead. And the maester had already told me I would not rise from childbed. He said I would be lucky if I still lived by the time you arrived."

"Yet here I am, brother," Lyanna laughed weakly. "You've always told me I was too stubborn for my own good. Give me your hand, Ned!"

Thin long fingers held Sansa's own and she admired the warmth of the Elder Brother's hand.

"Promise me," she repeated, as they turned their joined hands to the multitude watching, to show clearly how Lyanna's grip on her brother's hand had slowly weakened as the commanding parchment demanded.

"I promise," Ned Stark swore, one arm touching the pommel of his sword, to give more weight to his words. "This vow I will never break. I swear it by the old gods, Lyanna, I will keep your and Rhaegar's son safe. From Robert, my king and my foster brother. Even from my lady wife whom I love with all my heart. No one will ever learn from me who he is until such time it is safe for your son to reveal the truth."

"Take him…" the strength of Lady Lyanna's voice dwindled under the high vaults of the Tower of Joy. "Take him, Ned! Name him Jon, Jon Snow. Until such time he can take his father's name. I hope that the name would please Rhaegar…"

"Rhaegar… my love," Lyanna started losing consciousness. "Forgive me… I promised you that I would live for our child, but I cannot, now. The pain of losing you is too fresh… I have to leave first."

Those were the last words of Lady Lyanna Stark, or so Mance told Sansa in the long nights when they travelled south from the Quiet Isle. Howland Reed would murmur them endlessly to Mance Rayder in the shelter of the Greywater Watch, unable to forget them, and Mance had faithfully passed them on to his mummers. Sansa closed her eyes firmly, the last words of her aunt still ringing in her head. "I have to leave first."

The more she thought about them, the less sense they made. They were more wrong than the knowledge that Jon was her cousin and not her brother, a revelation she could immediately accept as truth as soon as she had seen it on the parchment, when Sandor thought she had cried because she feared to die on the stage. Still, the way her love tried to give her courage was a precious offering to her hungry heart. _He can be gentle,_ she thought, dreaming behind her eyes firmly closed.

 _My poor mother,_ she remembered. _She suffered for nothing. So did Jon, and my father…_

Ned Stark bent over the immobile form of his sister, still holding her lifeless hand. He remained that way until Lord Reed in a shape of Mance Rayder coerced him to leave the chambers, and in their case, the stage, so that the silent sisters could do their task and prepare the remnants of Lady Lyanna Stark for her last ride to the crypts of Winterfell.

The mummery was over.

"Come back, singer!" Queen Daenerys called Mance Rayder back to the stage. "Tell us, where is my nephew? Where is Rhaegar's son? Lord Stark took him north, I suppose."

"Your Grace, sadly, the boy did not live," said a wise womanly voice from far down in the crowd. "Several days later, Lord Stark visited Lady Ashara Dayne in Starfall, the castle of the Daynes high above the sea. He brought her Arthur's sword, which I have kept for Aegon, and he told her that the little boy, Rhaegar's son, had died, just like his mother before him."

Septa Lemore stepped forward amidst cries of surprise, persistently climbing the stone stairs all the way up, pushing her way open with difficulty towards the place where Sansa still lay. Mance was already there, waiting with his lute, ready to sing his final song, asking for help for the North. Lemore's long dark hair with traces of silver shone loose on her back, falling almost to her feet, and she didn't look like a septa at all, far more beautiful than either her age or her station should allow, despite the prominent shortness of her stature.

"No, Your Grace," Mance said to Daenerys, in denial of septa's words. "Honourable Lord Stark lied to Lady Dayne to better protect Rhaegar's son and heir. He lied until his dying day as he had sworn to do, never deeming the time safe to talk to Jon, or anyone else, about Jon's true parentage. He wouldn't admit the truth to anyone even if it could have saved his own life."

Daenerys stood up proudly. She first looked at Aegon, and then at Lady Sansa, still peacefully lying on her aunt's dying bed.

"The House Targaryen owes a debt of blood!" the queen proclaimed in a deep thunderous voice, black as her dragon's, making many high lords cringe in fear. "To the House Stark and the House Dayne! For a service of protecting the life of one of our own that cannot be enough honoured or paid! From this day on, I intend to protect any living member of those houses from any harm!

"It can't be! You're lying!" the septa finally reached Mance, and rebelled against his words, sounding hateful and out of her mind. She grasped both hands of the northern singer with a grip of steel, letting his lute fall on the ground. "Tell me the truth! Or I will spill your guts in front of the southron gods so that not even your soul will ever make it back to the vast woods of the North!"

The woman looked even shorter when standing next to Mance Rayder. From her black robes she brought forth a rather short black blade on a simple hilt carved of bones. From under, Sansa could notice that the tip of the blade was damaged as if it had been chipped off on purpose. She pressed the strange dagger to the softness of the singer's belly, bent on delivering her threat, fiercer than many men would be in living up to their dark words.

"Jon lives, woman!" Mance Rayder whispered to the desperate woman endangering his life. "I have travelled far to let his aunt and his adopted brother know this! I thought if they knew of the love that joined his parents, they might want to help him… Help the North! Gut me if you have to, but that is the truth!" His own brown eyes widened in surprise that seemed to warm his aged wildling soul from the inside out, when he dared lowering his eyes to the weapon leaning against his tunic. Incredulously, he touched the black blade of the dagger as a long lost child of his own.

"A gift from the crow on the Wall," he said with profound respect. "My lady… It would seem that some songs are greater than even I have ever dared to believe! The songs that are not yet over, those that may yet be sung until the end of time! You have deceived me well!"

"Ned lied to me in Starfall?" she stuttered, incoherent, as if she were losing herself between the too many disguises she must have worn in not such a long life. Sansa's heart soared to the shattered woman, wishing to offer consolation in her grief, resembling Sansa's own when she would lose members of her family, one by one.

"You must have deceived him too," Mance Rayder said honestly.

"Jon lives?" the woman whispered back, her soul in the question, withdrawing her weapon, not made of steel, but of black stone.

"If the Others did not take him by now, he does," Mance affirmed, steadfast in his words and stance. "He has become a man you can be proud of."

"Guards, apprehend that woman!" Lord Baelish cried his lungs out, launching a command to both the Unsullied and the Golden Company. "She is no septa! She is a murderer and an impostor! She is Lady Ashara Dayne!"

The guards did not heed to his accusations, their eyes searching Daenerys' and Aegon's blank expressions for any orders. But the young Targaryens, true or false, only stood motionless, waiting.

Sansa sat up straight from her bed of blood, forgetting she should be dead, surprised as everyone else with the exchange between the septa and the singer, whose rough voice had become tinged with unquestionable sincerity and affection. Her eyes wondered forward and unwillingly stopped at Petyr. Her heart filled with unease and foreboding of his next move.

But Petyr appeared truly out of his wits, for the first time since Sansa had met him.

 _Something is going on not even Petyr knows about_ , Sansa marvelled with freshly rekindled hope. In the morning light, the eyes of the kind septa which had always been purple, turned dark grey like Sandor's. _Not truly, not like Sandor's, not restless and searching,_ Sansa corrected herself. _Flat and cold like stone… Like Arya's… Like Jon's… Like Father's_ …

Sansa's heart constricted with understanding who the woman must have been… Who she still was… Like in a real song…

Ser Barristan Selmy stepped forward then, ignoring the bandage under his eye. Sansa admired the air of courage the old knight radiated, the undisputed prerogative of the Lord Commander of the Queensguard, known for his deeds and bravery in all the Seven Kingdoms. Ser Barristan raised his head up high when he announced to his queen, to the high lords and ladies, what he must have known ever since he laid his aging eyes on the lady now standing with Mance. Although he had not seen her for too many years. _Since the Tourney in Harrenhal_ , Sansa was certain. Ser Barristan appeared content beyond measure, and somehow sad at the same time.

"No matter how my old heart may wish that Lady Dayne had lived," Ser Barristan said and smiled, "I swear on my honour as a knight: the great lady of Westeros that stands alive before you all is not Lady Ashara Dayne!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who commented and left a kudos between the previous chapter and this one. The anxious author is going to hide in a hole after publishing this chapter. I'm sorry about the cliffhanger. This is as far as I got for one chapter. Even if now everything is pretty much obvious, I guess, at least to me, despite my confusing writing style, which has everything to do with me, and very little with the fact that English is not my first language although it comes very very close to it.


	48. The True King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the true king comes forth

**Petyr**

Ser Barristan had spoken in favour of the southern common whore Petyr Baelish knew to be Lady Ashara Dayne.

Brandon Stark boasted in Riverrun how her inviting demeanour at the Tourney in Harrenhal left little and less to imagine. He was quite eloquent in telling how the hot Dornish lady had invited him to visit Starfall and share her bed. Brandon repeated it to anyone willing to hear it, not noticing how the face of his little brother Ned would turn longer and thinner than it was by nature, whenever the dullest of the Starks had to listen to the story of his brother's prowess all over again.

It was pathetic to see the old knight like Selmy tossing his sixty name days of honour to the wind, in the name of the fleeting passion of the flesh he must have felt for the beautiful sister of the Sword of the Morning, a highborn courtesan who gave herself away without coin to any man she wanted, if anyone asked Petyr for opinion.

The odd thing was, no one did.

The great oaf of the griffins, Lord Connington, was nowhere to be seen. Aegon and Daenerys stared forward, hair equally silver, eyes equally purple and bewildered, not daring to voice an opinion of their own, impressed by the tale that had unfolded before them, as only the very young could be, Petyr supposed, pitying them both.

"Pray, who is the great lady, then? Do enlighten us, Ser Barristan. You owe it to your queen!" he asked of the old knight and of everyone, hoping that the populace would take over his query with force, cause it to echo and reverberate under the shadow of Baelor the Blessed, until Petyr's latest designs came to the fruition come evening. And if the multitude started tossing stones at the so called King-beyond-the-Wall and Lady Ashara in the meantime, so much the better.

"Aunt Lyanna," Sansa said softly from the heap of red Lannister silks in which she sat.

An image painted by crimson foundation behind the living auburn of her hair made Petyr's heart ache with emotion he had nearly forgotten. The shorter dark haired woman gave her a heartfelt smile. Next she offered Sansa a hand to stand up. The two ladies embraced within the stern demands of custom and propriety of the great houses of Westeros, perfect in their highborn manners. Raven hair tinged with the colour of ash, the colour of sorrow and the House Stark, mingled with the red curls against the greyness of the sky.

Petyr's heart stopped, faced with a new supposition. He recalled _all of_ the conversation of Ser Barristan with _Ashara_ in the Red Keep, which he took as a confirmation of what his informants had found out for him, and nearly reeled on his feet.

 _This can't be!_ he thought. _She died and she was buried in the crypts of Winterfell!_ _Honourable Lord Stark took King Robert to see her grave!_

The drunk king had kept whining about it for weeks, after his return to the capital with his grey-eyed foster brother and new Hand in tow!

And instead of the cries of the smallfolk to condemn the brave woman, which Petyr so desired, only the surreptitious words of the wildling bard echoed in Baelish's fast working mind, "Lord Stark lied..." _Everyone can lie under the right circumstances_ , the boy from the Fingers knew it better than most.

"My lady," Mance Rayder said to the woman. "I dare not presume to speak for you of who you are. But I am eager to hear your story in measure that you would agree to tell it.

"How I long to tell it all, and tell it true after years of silence! For all to hear and judge my actions with prudence, and not with ill will," Lyanna Stark spoke with calmness and measure. "But there is another to whom I owe an account of my life since I have left the Tower of Joy, and he is not yet here."

"Ser Barristan, thank you for speaking in my favour. I would expect no less from the most honourable Sworn Brother of Rhaegar's Kingsguard who yet lives. I also have to thank you for not speaking of who I was when I was surrounded by foes condemning me to death: I had the impression then that they would wish me dead even if I were not a Stark, but a daughter of a peasant in Wintertown."

The multitude remained silent, and Baelish cursed them for liking pretty women and kind voices.

"Petyr," Lyanna Stark addressed him then. Her words were courteous, but her voice was colder than the first snow in the Vale, sending spikes of unease through his veins. "Do not misunderstand me. I am certain you only wanted the best for the realm when you agreed to carry out my death sentence in Aegon's absence. Do not blame yourself either for not recognising me on time; my own brother did not see through my disguise when he came to Starfall with Arthur's sword. The only woman he saw had been Ashara Dayne. We shared the hair colour. It is only that I am much shorter and my eyes are grey, small matters that the noble ways of living like a lady in Dorne could easily remedy..."

"Good-sister," Daenerys spoke then, aggravating the nervousness in Petyr's greedy heart, "I have always known that Drogon has flown away from me to save you for a reason. If I may ask, why could you not come forth to me about who you were?"

"You could ask the same of Drogon, good-sister, why did he keep his silence with you?" Lyanna Stark continued, not bowing as she should have in front of the queen. "I am certain he is in your head as you are in his." The black dragon rested quietly behind his proclaimed Mother, not taking part in the conversation as it had taken no interest in the play, harmless as the great bear from the Bear Island during winter sleep. Around him, the space on the stairs was clear, for no one, noble or commoner, dared to stand too close to the beast.

Aegon's handsome lips remained tight, his pleasing features washed over by the deepest of despair. Petyr barely suppressed a powerful laugh looking at the stupid boy whom he played for a fool as he had once played the mighty Lord Stark himself. _I will do the same with his sister,_ he thought, _somehow I will. She has to be too honourable for her own good. It is in their blood._

The Hound, who had read Rhaegar's role with grace for one with his reputation, appeared behind Sansa at that moment, still hiding his hideous scars with the wooden mask.

 _Afraid of the good will of the people, are we?_ Baelish thought with amusement. _You_ w _ouldn't want them to ruin your pretty face further, would you?_ Instead of moving closer to her aunt as a proper lady should, Sansa stood still, allowing the monster to cast his shadow over her. She may have even made one step closer to him. No more than it was _seemly,_ but the step was there. There was something in the gesture Petyr _could_ understand, unlike the revelation that her aunt had lived which was truly surprising. _Sansa loves handsome men and things well shaped,_ he thought. _It can't be._ Then again, Cat not only married, which he could still forgive, but also _loved_ the northern barbarian, silent and sullen in his brooding. By loving Ned Stark, she condemned him to death, and Petyr was only the long arm of the justice, or so he wanted to believe. A disturbing finding hit him: there was nothing wrong with the Hound's body when you didn't see his face. Petyr shook his head to discard the nagging thoughts, but once stirred they would not leave his mind.

Then, even his thoughts froze just like his blood first wanted to do from the sound of Lyanna's voice, for the very first time since Brandon Stark shamed him, defeating him in a duel for Cat's hand, making Baelish who he was, the smartest player in the game of thrones. He was grateful to Brandon Stark for that. The arrogant lordling helped setting him on a path that was his by rights, not of birth but of superior understanding. Petyr never spared a look long enough for Lyanna in Riverrun: he wasn't interested in cold-blooded women from the North who wore men's clothing or bearskin in the training yard, a thing Lord Rickard allowed to his only daughter, a pearl of his eye, for whom the suitors would be plenty even if she had lacked an eye or a leg.

Petyr's head halted because Lyanna Stark whistled like a man, holding her right arm straight. She appeared sterner than stone as her dark haunting eyes circled the greying autumn sky.

A white-headed bird Baelish fed at his window when he planned and discussed Septa Lemore's execution, the bird he thought a raven, appeared in the air. Back then, it looked like dying after a too long flight. On that day, it was a different bird. Its body was covered with shiny long black feathers, with a few lighter ones on its tail. Its majestic beak and sharp eyes were crowned with white feathery softness gleaming in the sun. It was the king of the mountains, the white-headed eagle, which the stupid peasants admired in the Vale, forgetting that it was a dangerous predator who would steal away their cattle at night due to the bird's beauty. Fearless, it croaked, sounding a warning to the crowd. The black dragon responded to it by a welcoming stroke of his spiked tail. It rose, it waved, and it hit the ground, enlarging further the empty space reigning around the great lizard.

"To me!" Lyanna Stark commanded. "Help me finish this song, will you?"

The bird flew to the Lady Stark's arm as a tame horse would come to eat from his master's hand. It let another menacing croak to the crowd, as if it warned them not to touch its lady, before it gave Lyanna a peck on her hair, making the woman smile.

 _The birds do not have an understanding,_ Baelish thought feverishly, _they cannot, those are the horror stories for small children in the North._ _The eagle cannot know my secrets...it cannot repeat what it heard..._

Then again, he was the one colluding to set on the Iron Throne a dead man walking, a thing he would not believe it existed either, until it came forward at the head of the army of living corpses. Or if that failed, he would side with a slaver from across the sea who claimed to be working for a faction called the _warlocks_ , and odd old sect according to Baelish's sources. They claimed to use magic, where the only magic Petyr believed in was the one contained in his own superior cunning.

Nervously, he recalculated the chances he had for success. The Kettleblacks must have already taken hold of the wildfire. Ser Shadrich, back in his service, was giving them a helpful hand. Lord Euron agreed to all his proposals, and the envoys of the High Septon have left the city gates before the new beginning of the mummery.

Even if the woman in front of him was Lyanna Stark came from her grave, it was not going to avail her. Petyr straightened his goatee and his thin spine, and looked at the stage with feigned interest. _Just talk, my lady, waste the time you do not have,_ he thought with newly regained superiority. _Birds will not help you._

_Not even Rhaegar would be able to help you if he rose from his grave.  
_

Satisfied, Petyr smiled.

**Sandor**

Sandor Clegane couldn't fight the urge to return to the stage when he heard Sansa addressing the septa as her aunt. And Ser Barristan did not deny her words. His former life of a sworn shield taught him one thing. If by a miracle of sorts Lyanna Stark stood next to Sansa Stark in the midst of so many people, it was only a matter of time before someone _tried_ something, be it a mocking bird, a dragon or a Frey. He didn't like the look on the face of Cersei Lannister either, after Ser Barristan had spoken. He could clearly see her behind the Dragon Queen, far on the left side, poisonous and proud as she had always been. A lioness weighing her chances to attack.

Shyly, the Hound picked the ridiculous sword he wore as Rhaegar, with deep dislike that his own good steel was left with the Sand Snake at the city gates. Menacing the world by his body height, he assumed guard duty next to Sansa, no longer a man weakened by his desires. He was only a soldier ready to shed blood at the slightest provocation. He gave a look to her aunt if that was who she was. And when the eagle came to her call, just like the direwolf always followed Sansa, he had no doubt left. Lyanna Stark was exactly like the little bird's sister might have been if she had a chance to grow up.

All of a sudden, faint singing could be heard from the crystal depths of the Sept, accompanied by the sorrowful weeping of a high harp. The black dragon flapped its wiry wings and issued a puff of dark smoke. The eagle flew away from Sansa's aunt and sat on the dragon's neck, croaking with delight.

_"She pledged him her faith_

_Her vows fresh as the spring_

_Her words a flight of an eagle_

_Under the mountain wing,_

_In the clear sky,_

_In the clear sky!_

_xxxx_

_You cannot hold an eagle_

_Not against her will_

_Through the tempest and the snows_

_Find her way she will,_

_And always fly free,_

_And always fly free…"_

The sad song came and went. The bird on dragon's neck spread its wings, disappearing into the sky, and the mass of human flesh waiting to be butchered in front of the Hound dissolved in whispers of amazement.

" _The mystery bard! It's him!"_ they were saying, and they wouldn't relent.

The Hound didn't know what he expected to see when he compulsively arched his neck backwards, torn between curiosity and watch duty he took upon himself. Soon, the man singing would have to show his face among the high pillars, and then through the great doors of the Hall of Lamps.

He never expected it would be the Elder Brother, yet it was no other than his brother in Faith. The man he knew so well changed thoroughly. The monk's cloak was gone and with it the demeanour of the servant of the Seven. The black armour on his long thin chest fitted him as if it had been made for him, forged to his body shape in the insatiable flames of the old Valyria when the dragons of old still lived. The opaque red stones Sansa had sewn on it were no longer made of rock. They were red rubies, perfect in size and shape, shining brighter than any other jewel of the highborn lords in the calm dullness of an autumn day. The rubies formed a snarling three-headed dragon, red on black, for the trueborn sons of the House Targaryen.

The man carried the harp with silver strings, two of which were clumsily attached as if they had been previously missing. On his head, he still wore the red scarf won by the Elder Brother in Highgarden. As soon as he approached Sansa's aunt, the man stopped playing, laid his harp at her feet, and pulled one of the scarf ends loose. The headdress unfolded on the great stairs as a coiling crimson snake. Long silver hair cascaded to the middle of the man's back, making his black eyes shine with strident purple glow in the same instant.

Yet when Sandor Clegane looked in the depth of those eyes, he saw the modesty and the humility of his brother in Faith, hidden in the highborn lord who walked out of the sept to claim his birthright. Little bird observed his coming with some fear, where the Hound harboured none.

He was the first one to drop on one knee in front of the newcomer, just like he did on the Tourney of the Hand when King Robert halted his duel with Gregor. In all seriousness, he bowed his head with unfeigned respect, and pronounced the words due to a true king.

"Your Grace," Sandor Clegane said.

There wasn't anything else left to say. He'd be a good dog to a new master.

But the dragonlord who revealed himself walked over to the first man who knelt, and pulled him back up on his two strong feet until they faced each other; the younger man, tall as a monster, and the older one, shorter but equally imposing, with sadness and the wisdom of age underlining his noble features.

"My brother," Rhaegar Targaryen said, and the colour of his voice was iron as in the songs about him King Robert had forbidden. "I will never be able to thank you enough for everything you have done for me since the gods have set you on my path. And if I ever forget who I am again, there is no one else I will trust to stand behind my back and remind me."

Silence that reigned was such that not a leaf dared fall from a tree in the city of King's Landing, defying the change of seasons.

The undeserved praise almost made Sandor Clegane blush, and he fervently hoped it was not the case when the man whom he addressed as a brother in the past removed the mask from his face, making it visible to all.

The Hound saw from the corner of his eye that Sansa was on her knees too. So was half of the people watching, and the other half stood still, muted by the shock. Daenerys Targaryen smiled like a child, her hands closed in a gesture of prayer. For the first time since Sandor Clegane had known her, the Dragon Queen appeared to be in truth what she looked like, a young girl free of cares, her innocence intact, and not ruined by the turning of the world.

The Hound expected hooting and stones but none came his way. Only sighs of awe and fear, from the new dragon and his fearsome guard. In the omnipresent silence, he understood that the multitude, and _Rhaegar, King Rhaegar,_ waited for him to speak. He thought of what Sansa's septa or his maester might say, and with great pain he remembered a simple courtesy.

"Thank you, Your Grace," he managed. "You honour me."

It was enough.

King Rhaegar walked to _his wife_ who stood proudly several steps away.

There, he fell to his knees and embraced her wife's feet, not daring to go higher than that. For a while he stayed like that, unable to speak.

A ball, a ball of fire, a flying cry of murder came fast towards the prostrated king, from somewhere in the crowd, a deed of black magic never seen in Westeros. The Hound's crippled sword blocked it before it would reach the target, but the weak blade caught fire and started smoking in Sandor Clegane's hands. Then, lazily, the black dragon behind Daenerys snorted with the greatest precision Sandor have ever seen the beast employ in their short acquaintance, quenching the flames, coating the sword in a thin layer of familiar sharp black crystals. The Hound turned the renewed black blade towards the spot where the ball came from. Enraged, he growled to the unseen enemy, completely hidden by the nobles and the commoners alike. "I wouldn't try that again if I were you!"

The threat set the tireless wildling in motion. Most of the mummers wore some kind of armour at the end of the mummery and soon all of them stood between the king and the mass, as a colourful Kingsguard of sorts.

The Hound's grey eyes were drawn then to the cage hung on the statue of Baelor, in a likes of which he almost ended his life as crow food, when he was caught drunk in the riverlands. Caged, his opponent from Highgarden, the one-eyed dead kraken, silenced with some rotting fabric in his mouth, gesticulated madly and begged to be allowed to speak.

"Let His Grace speak first," the Hound said to no one in particular, embarrassed again with the attention that the crowd continued to award to his person. He withdrew to a place between the royal couple and his little bird, and turned to what he knew best-

-Impassively standing guard while his betters did the talking.

"Lyanna," Rhaegar mumbled, unable to show his handsome face from under his wife's feet, seemingly unaware that his life had been threatened at all. "Can you forgive me?"

"There's nothing to forgive," she said, happiness lightening her stern features of a Stark, taking down the years she too had carried and endured. "You didn't know who you were, did you?"

"Not until today, not fully, Lyanna, I swear to you by the old gods and the new," Rhaegar kept muttering. "It was maybe better so, I do not think I would have made it alive from the riverlands had I known who I was. What is more, I do not think I would have been able to live all the years that have passed if I was not blessed by forgetting what has happened to me on the Trident... It would kill me with more certainty that Robert's warhammer ever could if I had to live with the knowledge that all of you, Elia and our children, and you and our unborn child died..."

"Tell me," she urged him, her voice as soft as Sansa's in the dark corners of the night.

The Hound shivered like a dog forced to take a bath, and gazed briefly at his little bird who eagerly observed the couple in front of them. _Just like in one of her songs,_ the Hound thought absurdly. He knew that the world was going to crush that song too, as it crushed all others, but he could find nothing wrong if Sansa was enjoying it while it lasted. _Isn't that what life is all about?_ he thought.

"You tell me first," Rhaegar begged, not knowing shame in showing his weakness to half of the realm.

"There isn't much to tell," Lyanna said, lowering herself to the ground to face her husband. Lovingly, she took his face in her hands and forced him to look at her own. "Howland Reed told true what happened to Arthur... And Ashara... she was braver than any of us thought, and our debt of blood to the House Dayne is so much the greater. When she still lived, she sent me a letter and a valuable gift, a rare potion she brewed from the poison of the vipers of Dorne that would make both Jon and me appear as dead when Ned came after us. If he refused to help us, all I had to do was take a few drops myself and give one drop to Jon. We would die of a seemingly natural death in front of my brother's eyes. And when the silent sisters loyal to the House Dayne would come for us, Ned would receive two different bodies to take North... And the most silent servants of the faith would take Jon and me to Starfall where a ship would carry us across the sea..."

"Whose bodies would he receive?" Rhaegar asked, his purple eyes again lowered in shame.

"Ashara's," Lyanna whispered. "And the body of her bastard child with my brother Brandon, from the only time they lay together. Ashara erroneously believed that was what Arthur wanted her to do, to hide the truth of their love from the world. She was hiding her condition from Arthur who followed you to war, but it was true nevertheless. She didn't drink moon tea on time. Or it had no effect if she did, she would not tell. She knew she was going to die in childbed the second time like Elia would have done if you... if you... You know. It's just that I.. I... I was a coward. I was not the brave woman any of you believed me to be."

"When Ned had our banner unfurled in front of the Tower of Joy, I was more mad than your father. I was unable to give Jon the substance. I didn't trust Ashara's knowledge of poisons, I had no idea she would trade her body for mine in death, or that she had died in the meantime. I thought that maybe she had betrayed us, that everyone had betrayed us. And I couldn't, I couldn't go on living after they told me you died on the Trident. So I took Ashara's poison only for myself and laid down in sheets bloodied by horse blood to deceive Ned. At that moment I trusted Ned to protect Jon more than I trusted Ashara or myself. He was always so calm, so trustworthy. More than any other descendant of my own House. If anyone could have helped Jon, it was him..."

"When I woke up in Starfall, I discovered I was wrong to doubt Ashara. I started posing as her, and soon even her own servants believed me. Then Ned came along with Arthur's sword, and told me Jon had died. I never believed he would have been capable of lying to Ashara about Jon, not after the way Arthur died, and the conversation they shared... When Ned left, I couldn't forgive myself. I blamed myself for Jon's death. I should have never left him with the wet nurse! I would have jumped off the cliff in Starfall as I later on let everyone believe that I did."

"That Ashara did..."

"Then, the raven came from King's Landing, from Lord Varys. It came with my eagle, and my eagle made me stick to life, as little as it was worth to me at that time. Lord Varys was writing to Lady Dayne how he saved little Aegon, and regretted not being able to save Rhaenys or Elia. He apparently assumed that the women... would only get raped and that little girls... would not get killed in the sack of King's Landing."

"He thought the new rulers would only marry Rhaenys off to someone, to secure their hold of the Iron Throne despite her young age. He did not count on Lord Tywin's wrath for what people talked your father did to his late wife... So Lord Varys made an honest mistake, and he only replaced little Aegon with someone else's baby. He could not forgive himself for that, just like I could not forgive myself for giving Jon away. He was asking Ashara to go across the sea with Lord Connington and help raise little Aegon, believing she would be one of the few people left alive in the realm Rhaegar trusted... Lord Varys didn't know about you and me, whatever he may have suspected. He didn't go to the tourney at Harrenhal, he never saw me, and I doubt that he had ever seen Ashara either. Neither did Connington from nearby."

"So I faked Ashara's death from grief and I went... I went north again. I sent my eagle back to the Fangs where it came from until such time that I would return to Westeros. If I ever returned... Little Aegon lived and I... I am a Stark. I was bound by my sense of honour to help Arthur and Ashara's son as they have helped me. And I thought that if anyone was ever to take the Iron Throne as your son and heir, you would have wished it to be Aegon if you had been able to choose. The rest, you know or you can guess… I just don't know how much you remember..."

No more balls of fire came from the good people watching, and the Hound allowed his shoulders to descend slightly in his guarding posture.

"Lyanna, how can you forgive me?" Rhaegar asked. "How can you, after I swallowed all the lies my father had had poured in my credulous ears?"

"Rhaegar," Lyanna said seriously. "They tried with me first. With both of us I think. Before our wedding in Highgarden. They sent a woman after us from the West, Maggy the Frog they called her. Later on I have met her kind. She was a Maegi from across the sea, a witch powerful and strong. She had somehow found us by using her power."

"She stole your Valyrian steel dagger and cast a spell upon it. If I looked at it when you were away, she said, it would show me how you fared, and if you were unharmed. She cut off a piece of my own obsidian dagger I carried from the Wall with your blade, and placed the same spell on the piece of the dragon glass she chopped off, not bigger than a pendant to wear around your neck. She told me those were to be our wedding gifts to each other. Powerful tokens for the future king and the future queen, she said. Then she returned your dagger to you. Indeed, you offered me that blade on our wedding, and I gave you a pendant Maggy made, starting to believe her words."

A cracking sound of breaking glass caused the Hound's attention to veer from Lady Lyanna to the place in the mob where Cersei Lannister no longer stood. Tommen bent over the sprawled form of his mother. He was removing shards of glass bracelets from her bleeding arms and calling her to her senses. The highborn ladies around her made space to allow her some air. The Hound could not fathom why someone would show such kindness to Cersei, but then again, he was no lady.

Rhaegar and Lyanna only saw each other, and Sansa's aunt continued, not noticing a thing.

"We left Highgarden in a hurry. It was lucky. Maegi didn't have time to bring your father's men to our trail. I don't know if her power failed her, or if she stopped looking for us, but she had never found us again."

"But the first time you were gone to King's Landing to see your father, before you rode to the Trident, I understood that the visions the dagger showed me of you were twisted. You were often with the ladies at court, or with the women in inns along the paths you travelled in your war campaign. I didn't believe it and I refused to look at it any further. If it were more often Elia than other women, I might have believed it, but it was never like that."

"As in the visions my gift showed you always spoke to Arthur alone," Rhaegar said bitterly. "And never to Ashara... Then Lewyn came and..."

The true king started crying like a little boy.

"Hush, Rhaegar, it's all over now. We're alive if only for a little while longer. And we have to head North as fast as we can to find our son."

"We should find strength to tell the rest," Rhaegar said humbly. "The people deserve to know. Before the singers less talented than Mance Rayder invent lies of their own... When I came to say farewell before going to Trident, I have already doubted you. The last night we spent together, you slept peacefully on your side, large and beautiful from carrying our child. I stole the dagger from you. I put both the dagger and the obsidian pendant in the pouch I wore under my armour, around my neck, obstinate not to look at them any more. I also didn't want you to see me. In part to punish you for the betrayal I suspected, but also because I didn't wish you to see me die… If I was wrong, and if you did love me, and if my fate was to lay my life down..."

"When Lewyn came to me before the battle with Robert, and confirmed my suspicions about you, I broke down. I played the entire night. In the morning I broke my lance in two and threw it into the river. I tore two strings out of my harp and put them in the same pouch with the wedding gifts we exchanged, and hanged it all around my neck. I was still _vain_ and arrogant enough to give the ruined harp to Ser Barristan and command him to take it back to my personal treasury in the Red Keep. The mad ones among my ancestors must have been proud of me that day. I took the first sword I found, from Lord Darry, I think, a weapon that didn't suit me at all. I took it in my right hand and I left."

"I rode to the Trident and... you know. You've seen it in the play."

"Robert burned me. That was his mistake..."

"Fire... cannot kill a dragon..." Daenerys Stormborn said quietly from her seat, her own hypnotic eyes unwavering from her brother.

"No, it can't," Rhaegar agreed. "I know that now. But back then, for all my upbringing, I had no idea such a thing was possible."

"I had been badly wounded and as good as dead. Some honourable men thought of tossing the entire contents of the pyre to the river after it burned out to Robert's satisfaction. They told his envoys observing the fire that my cursed ashes danced in the wind just like he wanted. I heard them as if I were observing them in a dream. No one bothered to look at the contents of the pyre where a naked body devoid of consciousness due to a chest wound would have been found, or that is my best guess on the matter... The fire must have kept the flesh on my chest from festering and rotting for all I know... Cleansed me. Kept me safe. The water of the Trident completed the wondrous work of a maester the fire had started..."

"When I woke up among the monks on the Quiet Isle, I didn't know who I was. The only thing that was left of my life was the purse with our wedding gifts, stripped of the jewels my dagger had contained by those hard working men who prepared my corpse for burning, and the torn harp strings... And a broken lance that was found floating next to me, or so a good man who nursed me back to health told me."

"When I remember him now, I doubt he's ever told me the entire truth."

"He taught me that my name was Randyll, like Lord Tarly's. It's not that different from my own name and it sounded pleasing enough. He told me I was a soldier of Highgarden who had been married and widowed twice. This also rang true, for you and I have married in Highgarden. One of the few things I could always remember, Lyanna, was standing in the godswood there, but never the face of the woman I married. My saviour told me I fathered children, but that they were grown and did not need a father any more. He repeated all that as many times as he changed herbs and ointments on my ruined chest."

"He gave me a root, _wolf's grass_ , imagine, you must _love_ the name, may your eagle forgive me. He gave it to me to chew it every day, saying it will help with the smaller injury I sustained on my head when I supposedly fell to the Trident in the heat of the battle. The root kept my head bald and my skin smooth. With my hair gone, my eyes were plain black when I would observe my own face under the monk's hood I took to wearing in the calm mirror of the river."

"The good old man repeated the story of my supposed life until the day I got out of bed, bald and calm, and believed every word he said."

"Except that it never felt like my real life, not truly. I will never know why the Elder Brother before me did what he did and if he was loyal to my cause or not, but what he did saved my life. I cried when he died as I would not have cried for the loss of my own father."

"So I was elected the Elder Brother then, by the remaining brethren of the Seven. I lived with the monks, I studied, and I travelled, and I read. I learned the art of the healer which was something I had always wanted, and it gave me immense joy to help people, even their animals. I did what I could not do as the Prince of Dragonstone. I lived in peace of the Seven until I went south again..."

"I thank the gods for it, Lyanna. I thank the gods Mance Rayder came to the Quiet Isle. I thank the gods that the High Septon sentenced Cersei Lannister to death and invited all high ranking servants of the Faith to King's Landing. I thank the gods for sending me south once more... If I did not go, how would I ever found you again?"

"When did you start doubting who you were?" Lyanna asked tenderly, her wolf side tamed for the moment, her grey eyes rimmed with red, Sandor noticed, and not from the weirwood sap as his own and Sansa's masked faces had been.

"A white raven came from the Citadel. It was autumn. Wolf's grass became scarce to find. Stubble started growing under my hood. I tried shaving it but it wouldn't go off. I tied bandages around my head not to suffer from a terrible itch. Also, I met your niece, Lady Sansa, and she was _familiar._ She is very different than you in looks, but she is still a Stark through and through, as I had known you to be. She didn't act as a Stark though, for reasons of her own, and it bothered me beyond measure. It pierced a hole in the armour of peace I wrought for myself."

"Then, I watched Mance's play. I couldn't keep my eyes away from it, whether it was proper for a brother of a Faith or not. I couldn't stop thinking about the wolf girl and her dragon prince. And sometimes I had an idea for what Rhaegar could say, of what I said to you, Lyanna, and I had no idea where it came from. I told myself it was from too much reading and from my travels to the Citadel... When Mance said he met Howland Reed, I burned with curiosity to hear what Reed had told him. I knew from my reading of scrolls about the Rebellion that he was the last one to see you alive... He and Lord Stark who no longer lived."

"We came to Harrenhal. I stared at the lake where we stood together and the sight pained me. I knew I was there before and I have never been to Harrenhal as the Elder Brother. There, I took part in a joust, as a mummer. I nearly unhorsed the Hound then, and it frightened me. Who was I to almost prevail against a much younger man, famous for his jousting prowess and cruelty all over the realm?"

"When I finally came to the capital, I saw you dressed as a septa in the Hall of Lamps. You fainted. I went to you like the sea is unstoppably drawn to the shore, having no idea who you were, but one of Oberyn's daughters would not let me see you. I immediately knew your companion was Oberyn's daughter without knowing who Oberyn was, at first. Elia's brother... And she, she...your friend… She has Elia's innocent face when she wants to show it to the world."

"Soon, I saw you again and I reacted to you as a man, where my body seemed free of such urges for years without any forcing on my side."

"Then, I was to fight until death, and I was certain I would loose. I knew I was no warrior. My friends made me a lance from all the lost treasures Trident preserved for me yet I didn't trust my hand. Sandor Clegane, my brother, went practising with me and told me, with a great measure of surprise, that I was not a gnat. Coming from him, it was the greatest compliment a poor hedge knight I thought myself to be could obtain. So I trusted myself a bit more."

"What did you think when you saw me, Lyanna? Didn't you see how I was?"

"I knew you as soon as I saw your face. Your hood was only lowered in part in the Hall of Lamps before you put it back, and your hair was gone, yet it was you. I saw you were not yourself by the way you stared around in the sept, and I didn't know what was wrong with you. I thought I was dreaming and it couldn't be you. I suppressed the cry of my heart for I didn't want to betray you if you didn't want it known who you were. Or if you didn't want me after all the years. I felt withered and ugly. I fainted."

"When I came to my senses and heard the heralds proclaiming you the champion of the Faith, I made Oberyn's daughter run to the High Septon and suggest the fight to be a joust. I hinted you were like Arthur, my supposed brother, if there were spies. I knew my husband, lost to me or not, to be a hero, and a warrior if need be. I trusted you would not loose a tilt to any opponent, cursed or not, as the septas whispered Ser Robert Strong had been."

"When I felt strong enough, I went looking for you. You climbed a wall and you wouldn't talk, lost in a world of your own. I climbed on it after you and understood you didn't know me. You behaved as a knight courting me, not as my husband. I still wouldn't let myself believe fully it was you. Then, I also noticed the mummery and was most impressed by my niece and your foster brother playing us... They were not, well, they were not us, but the love they showed appeared as deep as ours... You couldn't stop looking at them as if they or the story meant something to you. I felt hope.

When what they made of Gregor Clegane nearly killed you, I removed your armour to nurse you. I saw only a part of your chest under the torn part of your tunic, and I knew I was not dreaming. It had to be you. I followed you after the fight. You disagreed in something with your brother in Faith, and you stripped in front of him. I nearly fainted again when I saw your scars. Everyone knew how Robert hit Rhaegar in his chest, splattering the rubies from his armour..."

Lady Lyanna put her dainty hand on her mouth, reliving both the horror and the joy of the moment.

"In that fight, I had my first come back," Rhaegar said. "Your face shone above mine and I thought I was in seven heavens. I was Rhaegar Targaryen after twenty years. Than it was gone and when I stood up, and until the end of the fight, I was the Elder Brother again. Yet I understood I was better with my left hand as I always was. And hatred burned in my veins as it never did, seeing the body of Ser Gregor Clegane with life. All I could think of was Elia's innocence, and how her husband, the silly prince who loved music _knighted_ the monster who was to rape and kill her."

"The wedding gifts we exchanged must have been truly cursed, Lyanna. For they were at the tip of my lance and they sent the monster to the limb between life and death where it stayed... I won, I the Elder Brother, not quite certain how I did what I did..."

"Then," Rhaegar continued, "Aegon rode in, and I admired him. But it was the arrival of my sister that stirred my heart. They said she had dragons, the treasure our deluded father could only dream about. And I, who believed to be a monk thirsty for knowledge went to see her, not thinking of my own peril if what they said of her was true. I had to see Daenerys. I succeeded, and I saw her not to be what they said."

"But then, it was not all. The dragon spoke to me and I was Rhaegar again. He told me I was his lord if I so wanted and that my sister was his lady and his mother. The dragons do not use words to convey their meaning, they invade us and they spurt it out like fire, in a dream-like world full of the quaintest of sensations… The contact was very short, but overwhelming. He told me I reminded him of his younger brother who was green in colour and enslaved. He was tremendously sad when he said so. My sister looked at me, and I understood that her child did not include her in the conversation."

"As I said, the contact was very short, and I was the Elder Brother again, happy and impressed to be in the presence of the Mother of Dragons as a small child."

"Then," Lyanna continued the story for Rhaegar seemed to lack breath. "Someone wanted to poison Aegon, but they poisoned one of his young guards and his mistress instead. They didn't know I have been putting tears of Lys to Aegon's wine for years to make his eyes appear purple enough... Just like I was taking it myself for the same reason, to look more like Ashara. The quantity of poison was wrong, and they lived… Aegon blamed me for this, and he was partly right... He did not know that I promised his mother before I went to the Tower of Joy that I would always look after him, and never reveal to him who he was unless he somehow found out himself... Ashara was lucky to die before the ravens came from King's Landing announcing how the Mountain killed Aegon..."

It was time for Rhaegar to supplement his wife's breath, taken over by memories too sad to be relived. The king continued the tale of the two lovers. "I was invited to the Red Keep to treat the victims, due to my known healer abilities. I stayed there all evening and long into the night. Everything was familiar. I felt that I could run in the corridors and never loose my way. At some moment, I fell asleep, I must have. When I woke up, I was shaken, as if I went somewhere, did something, not knowing what. It was the first time I knew something was very wrong with me and that there was something missing in my memories, a stretch of time when I had no account of what I did. My fingers had red marks I couldn't explain. Now, I know they were from the strings, unused as my hands had become to playing."

"Somewhere," Lyanna continued, "you must have found a harp. You hid above the king's solar and you sang of how Rhaegar went to Trident to die. I heard you, everyone did. I cried my eyes out that night. I cried so much in my life it's a miracle I haven't turned blind from it by now. It was the first time that I understood that something must have made you think that I had betrayed you. The day after, the entire capital was spreading the rumours about the mystery bard."

"That same night," Rhaegar continued as a man eager for his confession to be over, "Daenerys showed me your younger niece, the one that looks like you. She sleeps without knowing who she is, unable to wake up. My sister asked me to treat her. I accepted. But examining her condition only reminded me of myself. Except that I was suffering from it while being awake. As a learned healer, I assumed your niece should suffer a shock to wake up. I wondered if I needed the same. Before I had any answers we were on the way to Highgarden. My shortages of memory grew in number, and they lasted longer. I could no longer doubt the seriousness, even the potential fatality of my ailment. I feared I would sink to madness and I would not talk to my travelling companions."

"In the moments when I was Rhaegar, and not the Elder Brother, I sensed that Daenerys and Drogon flew south as well, no matter what she told her people or Mance. It made sense. A sister of mine would not sit idle while other people died for her, just like I would not. Not even my father would do such a thing, at least before Duskendale..."

"In Highgarden, Rhaegar woke up briefly to witness how Lord Euron Greyjoy enslaved two dragons by means of a horn he didn't know how to use. Sandor Clegane had a plan to retrieve the horn that I accepted as the Elder Brother, a monk who was a member of the company of mummers while Rhaegar slept. But then, you came to me as an eagle and you woke him up again. You woke me up. You were breathless, on the edge of dying. I knew you were in danger, but I did not know from what."

"And for the first time I wanted to stay awake, I wanted to be Rhaegar if that was who I was, but I was not able to hold on to my own name."

"In the night, I was the monk again, and I did not understand the eagle following me. The eagle felt like a curse, like the ravens who wouldn't stop persecuting me since we passed through Raventree. I was going to burst from anger whose origin I did not understand. A priest of the red god came after me that night and I fought him for the scarf on his head, not knowing why I needed it. I took it, and I let the eagle sit on my arm since it wouldn't leave me anyway."

"At dawn, the eagle left me, and I missed its presence where I couldn't stand it the night before."

"When I was alone, I found the first fountain in the city that was clear enough to offer a reflection of myself. I uncovered my head fully in the dim light which resembled dusk, the only light that Lord Euron's priest allowed to appear on the horizon. When I lowered my hood, I saw silver hair several inches high. I could not lie to myself that it was grey any longer, for even in the absence of light it still glimmered in its natural colour in the polished surface of the water. I rubbed my eyes and I tried to say to myself instead, that it was all the dark trick of the godless forces we were facing, and not my hair."

"When night came, I was forced to burn the godswood where we married. We needed firewood to save the city. Rhaegar woke up, I woke up, and all I could think of was you and the danger you were facing. I hoped that my burning of the godswood would not make your gods angry with you. I prayed to any gods that listened to keep me awake so that I could save you."

"The morning after, when we all rode out as one company to challenge Lord Greyjoy, Mance sang the song of our farewell in Dorne. He guessed the mood of it better than if I had written it by my own hand. I was the Elder Brother again. Yet my guts churned listening to the verses as if I was being taken to my own execution."

Lyanna interrupted him. "The eagle was returning to me from Frostfangs since she felt me in Westeros. She barely survived that trip. Than I flew with her to the Reach, to find you, in a few days I still had until my execution, and also on another errand to help Oberyn's daughter while I still could. I had to leave you sooner than I would have wanted for I turned very ill from exhaustion. Just like when I was a child in Winterfell, and I did not yet know how to use my gift without exaggeration…"

"I wanted... I wanted... I don't know what I wanted. I wanted to say farewell, at least as a warg that I am…"

It was time for Rhaegar to tip his wife's chin upwards and force her to face his gaze.

"No, Rhaegar, I will not lie," she said then. "I wanted more than that."

"I believed… It was more insane than some things your father imagined, but I still believed that you would find a way to come and save me again. As you did before when Lord Hightower kidnapped me on your father's orders, wearing your armour."

"Put a three-headed dragon on a bull's armour, and it will not make him a dragon," Rhaegar said with scorn. "He was lucky I left him with life."

Lyanna smiled to her husband, out of words again.

"So we all rode to face Lord Euron," Rhaegar continued. "As I went, I understood that Sandor Clegane, my brother in all but blood, was going to sacrifice his life to obtain the horn of the dragonlords for my sister. Euron mocked him mercilessly. A black fire burned inside my ruined chest and I was Rheagar again."

"I saw my brother wielding the shield of Ser Duncan the Tall, and I proclaimed him to be a dragonfriend. When he cleverly took my statement further, and told Lord Greyjoy he was the descendant of the legendary Lord Comander of King Aegon V Kingsguard to goad the kraken into doing what he wanted, I remembered the old paintings from that time. I saw them in the Red Keep and in the ruins of Summerhall. My brother thought he was lying to further his cause. But I was certain then, as I am certain now, that he unknowingly told the truth. Euron believed him too, eager to get hold of the blood of a true hero, or the blood of the dragon, needed to master the horn. My brother fought Euron single-handed and with the singular kind of courage few men in Westeros possessed.2

"Drogon, my sister's dragon who wanted me to be his lord, shouted in my head that I should leave immediately, for our sister was to be burned in King's Landing and not even dragons could fly that fast. I didn't know who he meant by our sister, for the only sister I had was standing there among the enslaved, watching, hiding her face. I told him I could not leave our brother to die. The beast agreed with my reasoning, yet it suggested I had to go or I was going to wish I had died myself."

"At that moment, I was the Elder Brother again, and I lost the ability to hear the dragon. I rode off after Lady Brienne as we planned, and with every step of the horse hooves I felt like a bastard for leaving my brother to die for the gorn we took. I should have rejoiced for our joint quest was successful, but I could not."

"As soon as I reached the woods, I turned my horse back, determined to try and save my brother if it was not too late="

"Drogon came flying after me and planted the seeds of peace in my confused head. He told me he helped our brother as much as he could in the time he had left. He told me he killed Gregor because _I_ told him to do so. I was never aware that I had voiced such command..."

"It was the first time I rode a dragon. I was Rhaegar all the time during flight, and I learned things I could only dream about when I read about dragons as a young boy, or visited Summerhall as a young man eager to learn how the attempt of my famous ancestor to revive them had failed. Drogon took us to the capital so fast that he was nearly exhausted himself…"

"He meant me as a sister," Lyanna said carefully. "Sister and wife are the same in the language of dragons, I would say."

"Yes," Rhaegar agreed. "And he must have read what you tried to tell me when you flew with your eagle, from the part of my mind no man can access at will. I will say more of that to you if one day we are alone and in peace under the roof of the Red Keep..."

"They were going to burn me..." Lyanna said.

"They never had a chance," Rhegar said stubbornly. "They only succeeded in waking the dragon."

"You took me away," she whispered in awe. "It was no dream of mine woven of smoke and ash, it was not your sister as I later tried to convince myself…"

"It was me," he said, and looked her in the eyes. "Then, when I was myself, I still believed that you betrayed me. And I discovered that I loved you all the same."

Lyanna lowered her grey eyes with sadness, and Rhaegar continued rapidly, willing her to _listen._

"I _had_ to leave you again in that cave in the Vale. My sister Daenerys was in danger because Drogon and I abandoned her among Lord Greyjoy's slaves in our mad quest to get to you on time. If he discovered her, he would have captured the means to reconquer the horn. So we had to fly back. The dragon threw me off in the forest without mercy, next to the horse I had in Highgarden. In the days that followed, I was the Elder Brother again, returning with Mance Rayder to the capital. Back in King's Landing we went to see Ser Lyn Corbray. After hearing the song of the mystery bard..."

"Your song," Lyanna said.

"My song," Rhaegar nodded. "After that Mance understood something has truly happened to me before the battle and he wanted to know more. Ser Lyn Corbray told us how Prince Lewyn Martell said he did to me what my father did to Lord Tywin's daughter to have his revenge. All because Lord Tywin loved and married his own cousin, a woman my father had wanted as a paramour for a time when they were all very young... Mance didn't know of any of that. When he pressed Corbray for information, I was Rhaegar only for a moment. But a moment was enough for me to commit to the memory I was about to loose again the truth of whom I had to see to learn everything…"

"Next time I woke up as Rhaegar, I sneaked to your abandoned chambers in the Red Keep. I stole not one, but two pairs of boots you used to pose as Ashara, making me almost as tall as the Mountain. By then I was used to being a mummer, and I had no shame to do what I did. I made a cloak long enough from some curtains and waddled as a proper grumkin to see the only person still living who may have known if Lewyn lied. And just like I hoped, I found out it was not you who betrayed me. It was him. He agreed to do what my father asked because he was afraid I would hurt Elia to please you."

"I who have loved Elia before I ever loved you…"

"The Targaryens love twice," Lady Lyanna said. "I too had my lessons about the Great Houses with the Maester. As a maiden, I could not understand how anyone could accept to live with that, but for you, I would have tried."

"I was enraged and I somehow sent my feelings to Drogon to whom I could talk more and more whenever I woke up as Rhaegar, just like I did in Highgarden. I had to do something with them lest they devour me and leave me a wreck. Drogon was flying out of the capital to bring you back for the mummery. My thoughts have reached him in the air, and he nearly killed Oberyn's daughter on the open sea, hating all Martells for what Lewyn had done. If Drogon did not recognise my brother who was with her, and remembered what he did for the dragons, she would not be with us any more..."

"The next day, the mummery started. Lord Greyjoy recklessly tried to overcome my sister. Aegon prevented it before Drogon would intervene. Ser Barristan fell, and the Elder Brother ran to help him. When I was returning to the sept, Ser Barristan looked after me for a moment as if he had seen a dead man come to life. It was one of the last things I needed to wake up for good."

"I smelled my father's foul substance then. I smelled wildfire. Still as a monk, I dragged Ser Jaime Lannister with me and hurried to the Red Keep. As I ran, I was both Rhaegar who knew all the hidden ways of the palace together with Arthur, and the Elder Brother, inexperienced in court, following Ser Jaime's lead. We took the damaged jar away from the sealed ones, and it was me who found the passage out of the palace Ser Jaime didn't know of. It was me who was able to carry the jar with bare hands without getting burned where Ser Jaime had to take precautions..."

"A dragon," Lyanna said with love.

"A dragon, I guess," Rhaegar repeated, smiling with ease. On the way here, we crossed the underground chamber where Arthur and me used to hide our cherished possessions. To preserve them for the ages to come, as we believed in our vanity of the knights of summer. My treasury. I saw my old harp there, the one with missing strings: Ser Barristan had kept his word and brought it from the Trident, under Robert's nose. I felt under my scarf and understood how much my hair has grown. I sent Jaime away, I took the harp and hid it in my robes. We reached the sept."

"I was the Elder Brother again, a monk with a very painful head. I went to see your younger niece before the play. She was sleeping as always, but in her sleep she grasped my hand and it was as if she wanted to tell me something. She couldn't. As if she wanted to help me to wake up and not the other way around. I was on the edge, and I thought I was turning insane."

£The mummery started again. The pyromancer worked on sealing the wildfire jar properly. When he finished, he returned my father's armour to me. I had used it to cover the jar so that I could carry it here without causing harm. I put my father's armour back on, for the tourney scene in Harrenhal. The curse of wildfire did something to it, something ordinary fire could not. The red river stones your niece attached to the armour melted and stopped being stones. They were rubies again and they looked... they looked like mine, like those that were scattered in the Trident, those that I hoped that the poor had taken. And the armour itself became soft, it bent around my body as if it had been made for me. I put it on, and the monk's cloak over it to hide the glowing of the jewels. It is autumn, and I was successful."

"I could sleep no longer. I was Rhaegar Targaryen and I didn't know what to do with that knowledge. So I waited for Mance's play to finish, for you to come forth, or for some sign that I should come forth myself..."

"You knew that Jon lived?" Lyanna asked with sadness.

"I knew that your brother's bastard Jon Snow lived and became the Lord Commander on the Wall. His ravens pleading for help reached to all places, even to the Quiet Isle. What I did not know, is that Jon Snow was our son. I learned that from the play, just like you learned moments after that our son had lived..."

"Rhaegar, shall we find him with life? Winter is coming..." Lady Lyanna's voice was flat, but a terrible doubt blossomed in her words.

"We have found each other over the abyss of death and time," he told her with calm conviction before he would face the people. "Why wouldn't we find our son?"

Lady Lyanna grinned, bestowing a fast kiss on her husband's lips, to which he responded with a jealous one of his own, holding her tight, not caring in the least about who had been watching.

 _They do not need masks to do that in front of all,_ Sandor Clegane thought with envy, glancing at Sansa whose face was more blank than when she had worn a mask. The face of a great lady he would never be worthy of. Not even the Hound could smell the truth of what she felt at that moment.

When they were done, Rhaegar stood up with his wife and held her hand.

"I am Rhaegar Targaryen, the Prince of Dragonstone, and a dragonlord of late, it would seem, like my forefathers before me," he announced solemnly, for the first time addressing the mute body of the people.

The Hound observed absurdly how the difference in height in the royal couple was similar to the one that existed between Sansa and himself.

"I have a claim to the Iron Throne," Rheagar said with modesty and truth. "But I will leave all such matters to your judgement, people of King's Landing, and honourable envoys from the houses big and small from many of the Seven Kingdoms. You have now heard all there is to know about me, for better and for worse! You may find me a poor ruler now that the siege and the dark tempest from overseas is at your door. Choose your own king or queen!"

When Rhaegar Targaryen spoke of his claim, a flock of ravens approached, closing fast on him from the entrance to the plaza, as if some magic had kept them in a cage until then, only to release them at the opportune moment. Just like in Raventree, they croaked with one voice, flying in circles over the standing couple and their mummer's guard of honour. A white-headed eagle returned, joining them in their pledge.

The Hound's sharp eyes thought to have seen a glimpse of Blackwood's son Hos and little Lord Arryn in the place from which the black birds came.

But the words the ravens brought that day were not dark as their wings.

"The King, the King, the King!" the ravens sang.

And all the people, highborn and lowborn alike, took their chanting to their hearts and lips, until every living soul on the plaza of Baelor the Blessed repeated it in chorus, except maybe for the bastard of Littlefinger and the dead kraken in his cage, who only opened their mouth, the Hound suspected, as he too started rasping with the birds.

"The King! The King! The King!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all your comments and kudos after the last chapter. Every single one helped to finish this chapter (half written since mid-April) with record speed. I hope that it takes care of the evil cliffhanger and I'm looking forward to hear what you think. I find that it lacks details of the settings, but since it's a confession chapter, it shouldn't matter too much.


	49. Storming of the Warlocks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Westeros protects the dragons and not the other way around

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for gore

**The sleeping girl**

The direwolf howled to announce her arrival behind the slavers' fleet, and the distance where it prowled seemed less frightening than before.

The sleeping girl could still cross it if she started walking.

 _The pack has just arrived from the Riverlands,_ she tasted it more fully than the air she was breathing. So did the blind dog forgotten in Harrenhal that her two-legged sister used to cradle on the way from the Vale. And the abandoned black horse named upon the god of death joined them in the wood, nostrils wide, with a bewildered hot-blooded horse from the far south in tow. The lesser wolves bent all four hairy knees to their she-wolf leader. _The ravens are gone, gone, gone_ , the girl lamented. Then again, they had always only been following the king. The white-headed eagle and the unruly young mountain hawk would follow the ravens. They would return when the king who did not know he was one, until the old gods helped him to open his eyes and see, would ride to the battle with his newly found northern queen.

 _The air above the capital smells like spilled blood, and the coming sunset will proudly wear its colours_ , the girl was certain. All animals would come then, even the cursed kraken if let from his cage. All save the mocking bird, lost in the forest of its own pugnacious mind.

The girl dreamed and dreamed, knowing she would forget all her dreams when and if she ever woke up. In her sleep, to her utmost amazement she found that she could walk! When her stupid bastard stag companion left her under the carved feet of the Blessed Stone Dragon of Old, to scream with rage of his late father and kill his false enemy in the mighty river, the girl stood up from her bed of yellow silks. Yellow was not the colour of the wolf. Her legs were frail but she still had use of them, finding the necessary strength in the realm of her dreams.

She did not look at the crow cage hanging above her.

She did not look at the three huddled figures below her, one shaking with sobs wrenching her black undying heart, when the mummers revealed how the sleeping girl's beloved brother was not only a wolf, but also a dragon. The brother pierced with daggers, his fate hidden from her sight even in her sleep, entrusted to a white wolf and a green dragon.

The warlocks from far away have not brought only their sellswords, slaves and galleys to Westeros from across the sea. They have brought their magic, above all. But the animals of the Seven Kingdoms still remembered their own. Somewhere, behind them, there were the children of the forest, and the children possessed great power, for good, or for evil. It was only that it was forgotten, and lost, with the slow passing of time.

For if the warlocks were allowed to take the dragons away, who would then fly north and attempt to do what even the children could not, thousands of years ago? Instead, they dwindled in number. They turned to exile and to dark places, hiding from the Andals and the First Men, coming forth only when great need arose.

The girl walked to the Dragon Gate, to do her _duty_ , forgotten by all, as if she too was a child of a forest. Swifter than a wolverine, she leapt forward on her two feet. The doors would be shut, yet a true water dancer would find the way to have them open. Even the stupid guards were half of a mind to watch the play. The still water could not be stopped. It would run through the hard stone with enough time.

Time that the sleeping girl did not have.

The look that the single guard tossed her way was an odd thing. He gazed at her as if she had been her two-legged sister, her beautiful, sweet, dishonest sister, in love with the fancy southron gowns of blue and green. The thin freckled man, a commoner by looks, neither too young nor too old, stared at the girl's long face and chest that used to be flat. The girl wondered why all the city guards always looked the same. Unruly and unhappy with their tasks. She had to touch her body to understand that she had grown in the time she had been asleep. And it was not only her hair.

"M'lady," the guard stammered. "Would ye go for a short walk if it please you? Ye won't regret your time, I promise..."

"Say rather that you won't," the sleeping girl said, admiring the colour of her own voice. It was deeper and less strident than she remembered it. She tried hard to remember her name, for hearing her own voice was a start, but as always, her effort was in vain.

The guard slowly opened the door and wrapped his armoured arm around the girl's waist exposing both his sword and dagger to her grasp, one at each hip. The sword would be too heavy, and the dagger would do fine.

"Back off!" she commanded him holding his own knife at his throat. "And keep the gates well closed, as the queen had ordered it!" The man hastened to obey, afraid at the mention of his queen. Alone, the sleep-walking girl looked forward through the purple mist and the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon. She stayed in one place until the gate swerved and was shut again. No enemy spy or scout or evil spirit would find room to sneak in after her. She had been a ghost in Harrenhal. She would be the ghost of the wood now, and her aim would not fail her.

Daenerys' fleet was near, but the dutiful girl had in mind a different road. The shortest one through the army of the dead and to the forest behind. _Calmer than still water._ She didn't think that the dead would harm her for she was only half alive. And if the night went wrong, she'd soon join their ranks. _Burned, ashes flying freely in the wind_ , she hoped, and _not the walking kind._ She never wanted to have blue eyes like her pretty sister. Grey suited her just fine.

**Jaime**

Only when the new king and queen took each other by the hand, ready to depart from the sept, Jaime dared to look to where his sister had fainted. Tommen still tended to his mother, with tender concern. _Will I never be free of you, sweet sister?_ Jaime thought. Yet his worry was not affecting his senses as it had always done in the past. At least there was that. Ashamed of his yearnings, he glanced at Brienne.

"Go," she tried to encourage him, wearing a startled expression he had never seen in her before, ever since the greatest revelation of the mummery evolved before their eyes, or better said behind their broad backs. They had stood immobile, guarding the new king and queen in the white armour of the Kingsguard, so that they could finish their incredible tale in the undisturbed peace of all the gods in the realm.

"I will be all right," Brienne tried harder.

She was almost chasing him away. Jaime felt a pang of hurt in his chest for he expected something else. Digging deep in his darkened soul, the answer was easy to find. He _wanted_ her to be jealous of him, not generous and openhearted about his past. As if the smallness of her heart would be the utmost proof or her love for him. The love which he so desperately required in order to face what was to come. He supposed he would be judged by the laws of the realm as soon as the more pressing matters of the kingdoms were settled, and the latest siege lifted. And the sentence did not loom favourable. As mad as Aerys II had been, Jaime still killed the king he was sworn to protect.

"But," he said, "it's Cersei that I'm going to see."

The outer edge of Brienne's eyes turned stubbornly blue. She did not say another word but Jaime knew that she made up her mind. Not even his father would be able to withstand Brienne's determination had he been alive to witness the defeat of all his designs for power.

"I will be back soon," he said lamely and walked in the direction of his son, hating himself both for leaving his wife to see his sister and his son, and for resenting the magnitude of Brienne's heart. _What does that make you?_ he wondered while walking.

"Tommen," he said, gently addressing his son when he reached his destination. "How is she?"

Cersei lay on her gown of foreign silks, her arms bandaged with what the kindness of ladies around her had provided. Lady Merryweather, _Cersei's latest lover_ , Jaime thought with distaste, was not far, trying to pay a golden dragon to few undecided commoners, to carry the fainted lady to a place of more propriety and comfort than the cold stones near the statue of Baelor. _At least she is trying to help her,_ Jaime tried to be condescending. Distracted, he picked up a shard of glass from the ground. It was singed on one side. Worried, he smelled it. There was no mistake there: the scent was the same as the open jar Jaime and Rhaegar had been carrying.

 _So now we know who climbed the stairs from the dungeons to open it, sweet sister,_ he thought with great sadness. _Were you quite mad? You would have burned us all if you could not have what you wanted... Just like Aerys would have done._

"Father," Tommen smiled, interrupting the chain of Jaime's thoughts. "I don't know myself how mother fares. She prattles in her sleep, of things I have never heard of. Of a man called valonqar who nearly strangulated her, and of mistakes she made. I've never heard mother admitting that she had made a mistake."

"Neither have I, I'm afraid," Jaime said, more acutely concerned than before for his sister's welfare.

Tommen and Jaime were interrupted by a sweet voice of a young girl. It descended like light summer rain over their joined backs as they were bending over Cersei. The voice that had already thundered over the sept with the force of a dragon, was now clearer and milder than the morning dew.

"If I may," Daenerys Targaryen said innocently, curving her perfect lips in a beginning of a smile. "I have resided in Essos for a while. Valonqar, I believe it comes from old Valyrian. It means "sibling". Younger or older, brother or sister, it makes no matter."

"Thank you, princess," Tommen was the first to master his courtesies in the ever changing circumstances of who sat on the Iron Throne. Daenerys smiled again. Jaime turned around and bowed his head, not certain what he could say. At least Daenerys Stormborn came alone, without a black dragon to persecute him for his crimes against her house.

"You are Tommen," she said.

"Yes, princess," Tommen confirmed.

"My nephew, Aegon, has just shared an interesting piece of knowledge with me," she continued with marked interest in her now purple eyes, carefully treading on an unknown ground. "He said that the Iron Throne has never cut in your flesh like it did in his."

"I may have been too young and too light to feel the bite of its blades," Tommen had the presence of the mind to respond properly, and diminish himself, stretching taller to appear less plump. The roundedness of childhood was slowly starting to give way to muscle, and he was not much lighter than Aegon despite his younger age. Jaime was proud to see his son fighting for his life and that of his parents with courtesy. "It is merely a meaningless coincidence," Tommen refuted his right to kingship further. "I have not known myself for an Usurper then. Now I know that I have no claim to the Iron Throne. Princess, I bent the knee to the rightful king. So did my Father. Mother, alas, was taken by a weakness proper of a lady."

"Yet, what Aegon said is true," Daenerys continued, unabashed by his pretence. "I wonder… What else is your mother telling about this valonqar?"

"That she has made a mistake," Tommen said carefully, not daring not to respond. "And at times she is begging her little brother for forgiveness."

"Tyrion?" Jaime could not suppress a question.

"Tyrion?" Daenerys parroted after him. "That is your younger brother? Is he… kind of short?"

"You could say so, but he has much bigger wits," Jaime informed dryly. "They come from our father, and I was not blessed with them, I'm afraid."

Daenerys clapped her hands with joy as if she was about to start dancing, had there been music to accompany her steps. "It pleases me greatly to hear all that. Siblings are the greatest treasure for the dragons. I have found an older brother today, one whom I have thought lost forever. Won't you come as well to the Red Keep to take part in celebrations?"

"As soon as Mother is taken care of," Tommen was again the one to respond. "Thank you for honouring us by your invitation, princess."

"Oh, it's nothing," Daenerys said. "I will be on my way now."

She said so, but Jaime noticed she did not leave. The commoners left Lady Merryweather during the conversation, not swayed to obey her by the little gold she offered them. In the end it was Orton Merryweather who came to do his wife's bidding, bringing a simple closed wheelhouse, and a pair of ignoble oxen to tow Cersei away. When Tommen started helping the couple to lift his mother, the Mother of Dragons was still standing patiently behind Jaime's back, waiting for him to say something. His eloquence failed him so completely that he only stared back at her, not comprehending a single thing.

"If this is about justice…" he started, seeing that she would not leave.

"There will be time for that, later, after the siege," she said mirroring Jaime's own thoughts, her demeanour much more serious than before.

"Then I fear I do not understand," Jaime admitted his defeat.

"Viserion," she said then as softly as she could manage, so that no one would overhear them. "You have met him, I believe. What did you think of him?"

"He seemed… young," Jaime said, unable to think of anything better.

"That he is," she agreed. "All my children are younger than me and much younger than you or my brother Rhaegar."

Daenerys Stormborn stood on tiptoes so that she could take hold of Jaime's shoulders from the slightness of her stature.

"I named two of my children after my trueborn brothers," she whispered in his ear.

And as if that were the entire explanation Jaime was ever due to receive, she sank back, and turned around, disappearing faster than the sea breeze, speeding after the long line of people determined to carry King Rhaegar and Queen Lyanna all the way to the Red Keep, only by the force of their rejoicing hands, and not in any carriage lavishly built by an artisan.

 _As if the force of their gladness will be enough to defeat slavers on its own_ , Jaime thought, his mood darkening again in a whim. A black tail swept above him in the skies, never far away from his mother. _Drogon, that is what they call the black dragon_ , Jaime remembered. And he couldn't help but wonder who the black child was named upon, for no name similar to that one had ever been recorded in the proud long lineage of the House Targaryen

**Brienne**

Brienne remained standing for a short while where her husband had left her. As soon as she was certain that his attention was not on her, she faded in the multitude abandoning the sept as blandly as she could, with her ostentatious appearance and shiny white armour of the Kingsguard betraying her on every step she made.

When the people veered towards the Red Keep, Brienne continued alone to the Mud Gate, in front of which, only a few dreamlike days ago, she had found Jaime in the water where a _dragon_ had dropped him. She thought then that the entire tale of being kidnapped by a dragon and taken to Tarth of all places had been Jaime's mummer's farce, to soften the offence of asking for her hand without telling her first. Yet with every passing too short day and night in Jaime's arms she was less and less certain about her suspicions and fears.

There was no lie in his embraces or it was so well hidden that she would gladly live in it forever. He kept looking at her as if she were the most beautiful woman in the world, more so with each day. Jaime saw something in her that the mirror and Septa Roelle were not able to observe, but which was nevertheless there. She didn't know when she stopped being afraid that he would return to Cersei as soon as he could, but she just did. Just like that.

So maybe the rest was also true.

And while she was impressed by the rightful king coming forth from the depths of time, and while she bent her knee willingly and wanted to serve the kingdoms as a knight if she be allowed, there was something _else_ only she must have heard in King Rhaegar's and Queen Lyanna's confession that wouldn't leave her mind.

King Aerys II, the Mad King, had done something to Jaime's mother. Who would also be Cersei's mother, and Cersei and Jaime were twins, so they could not have a _different_ father.

A suspicion too terrible to imagine crossed Brienne's mind. There was only one way men commonly hurt women who were not their wives, short of murdering them. The Bloody Mummers would have done it to her, not caring about her size and ugliness if Jaime did not shout about sapphires, risking that their captors cut his left hand as well. And she was spared a rape to come a maid to his arms on their wedding night.

 _Wife and sister are one and the same word in the language of the dragons,_ she retained that too, drinking courage from that thought. White-armoured, she was steadily climbing the rounded stone stair, leading from the Mud Gate below to the battlement on top of it. _Then, husband and brother should also be the same._

Brienne had no living siblings any more, so she felt half-crazy when she closed her eyes, leaning over the high parapet of the city wall, to be almost in the air.

 _Brother!_ she hurled inwardly, but no sound had left her mouth.

She hoped that her terrible suspicion may be founded and that the white dragon would come to her, and offer King Rhaegar and Princess Daenerys the proofs Brienne needed to save her husband's life. Further kinslaying would be against the laws of the realm, if committed in full knowledge of the matter.

Brienne closed her eyes again and waited, hoping beyond hope.

**Sansa**

The king left the sept and walked through the streets of King's Landing. The Hound watched his back from the danger that never came. The man Sansa loved was buried again, somewhere behind the appearance of a cruel soldier clad in mismatched armour. Everyone wanted to touch the king's garments or his silver hair in sign of good fortune. They brought him the boy whom he helped deliver, called Arthur, a sturdy babe of almost one moon. They asked for reassurance that the siege would not last. The queen walked behind, with Sansa, speechless and smiling. Sansa wanted to ask someone, anyone, where her sister was, and why she wasn't told before that Arya had been found. Found ill, in need of help, if the king's confession was true.

It certainly rang as the truest song Sansa had ever heard.

Then, maybe it was Arya who did not want her help, or for Sansa to be told where she was. Upset, Sansa seized her aunt's arm harder. But under the statue of Baelor the Blessed, the newly returned assurance of having a _family_ was torn away from her. The multitude was of a mind to carry the king and the queen further, high up on their shoulders, without anyone's command. Sandor Clegane followed close after them, in strides worthy of a giant. Sansa could not keep up the pace. She tried, yet soon she was left alone, forgotten by the mob, firmly set on its path from the Great Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep. At least no one tried to get hold of her for which she was grateful. The people were in a mood for cheering, and not for killing like when they rioted against Joffrey's heartless remarks, eager to taste the blood of the Bastard King. Sansa waited for the tide to pass, to follow them at the safe distance, holding onto the dais of the statue of Baelor, wondering if he too was as noble as her aunt's husband seemed to be.

Sansa did not want a noble husband. She wanted a burned one.

Her flow of thoughts was interrupted by a plea from above.

"Sweet lady," a dark voice said from the cage under the grey sky. "Help me. If you do not, no one else will. There is a chain at the hip of the stone dragon. Lower me, please."

Sansa raised her gaze until it met the black eyes of Lord Euron Greyjoy and they didn't inspire fear. They didn't seem evil at that moment, only arrogant as Theon's used to be. And Theon was surely reckless, an unreliable ally and a traitor to her brother Robb. But in the end he still saved Jeyne Poole from being forced to lay with animals, and he did not burn Winterfell. "Why would I help you, my lord?" she asked, wondering what she should do.

"Because you want your aunt to live," Lord Greyjoy said with perfect courtesy of a highborn lord. "You want the victory of the wolf and the dragon."

"Why is it that you do not gurgle, my lord," Sansa had to ask, taking offence in his assumptions of what she wanted. "Like the creature my late mother had become. I know what you are."

"And the thing that I am can sense the glimpse of truth in men… when I am not deceived by my own dreams of glory, that is. And those illusions have crumbled to the ground, I can ensure you," Lord Greyjoy rattled the chain of the cage, slightly upset by Sansa's lack of acceptance of his claims. "Lower me, please. I will tell you what I know. Then, you will decide what to do with me."

When her thin hands grasped the cold chain, Sansa feared she was once more being guilty of excessive trust. _Surely, there is no harm in talking,_ she thought. _As there was to be no harm in the godswood where Littlefinger nearly caught you,_ the voice of her awareness answered her. Yet she was unable to follow her own wisdom, although acquired with suffering and pain.

"Littlefinger, that's a sweet name," Lord Greyjoy said as if he could indeed read her thoughts, his black-eyed face arriving at Sansa's height from above. She returned the favour in kind, by staring  _into_ him as she would peek in the mind of the Hound's horse or of another simple animal. All she sensed was great hatred, and the powerful burning of betrayal, but no imminent deceit. Then again, men were crueller than beasts. She never felt hatred within a beast, yet. Mayhaps, only in the black dragon. The dragon who was neither human, nor a beast, nothing, really.

"Littlefinger, my lady," Lord Euron repeated. "He offered me revenge! But it is not the kind of revenge I desire to fill my empty dead heart. I seek vengeance against the one who led me to believe I could win this war! Not against those who were my betters in a fair fight. My false ally intended that I would _burn_ in the end, and _he_ would take the dragons for the foreign lords. I dreamt of gold, my lady, as most boys from the Iron Islands do."

"But all that there is, all that remains, is iron. The price has to be paid."

"The Wall your priest had seen in his fires is far away from the walls of King's Landing," Sansa whispered with comprehension, to hide that his words have moved her, wondering if she was committing treason for lowering the prisoner of the Targaryens to the ground.

"Indeed," Lord Euron said. "And as a man of the Seven Kingdoms before I was a sea captain or a lord, I should have seen it too. Maybe I shall go there yet, for the battle to come in the future."

Sansa still sensed no fraud in the dead lord before her. "If I let you go, my lord, what would you do then?"

"Me? A cursed wight who only kept his voice from his previous handsomeness?" Euron laughed, but the sound of his mirth was hollow, first time recalling the terrible threatening sounds of the Lady Stoneheart. "What I had wanted was the most beautiful woman in the world. She will have my head for what I did to conquer her. Yet before she does, I would bring her a mighty gift. A head to stand with my own on the spikes above the gates…"

"They will open the gates soon," Sansa said, hesitating.

"It would be best if they didn't. Then the cursed candle will leave the city, and the warlocks may be able to use it the same way I wanted to use the horn. The maesters of the Citadel say that the glass candles are only burning because the dragons have come back to life."

"So if one extinguishes such a candle by a work of dark magic-" Sansa assumed, living a new song. As merciless as some songs could be.

"-A dragon, or more of them would die," Euron finished. "Do not ask me how it is done, but you have seen the thick evil shadow that had taken my army out of Highgarden. You were swept by it yourself. Was that natural? Moqorro calls his god the Lord of Light, but the only true force I have witnessed from that god was in creating living shadows of darkness. I was ignorant to accept his guidance. Those who have more power will never bend to those with less."

"I will look for the candle, my lord," Sansa said coldly. Lord Greyjoy may have been lying but she could not risk that he had been telling the truth. The black dragon saved Sandor. It saved her aunt. Sansa was born a Stark. And if dragons were in danger, she was bound by honour to help them. Her late father would expect no less. She took the key from the top of the cage where it was stored, but she did not put him in the lock. She just took it and walked away while Lord Euron cursed behind her in language not even the Hound would have dared using in her presence.

The house of the fisherfolk was far from the sept, but Sansa made good pace through the stone-paved streets, choosing the emptiest ones she could find. She made her braid tighter as she walked. Passing a fountain, she looked at her face in the surface of the water, just like Rhaegar had been doing in his affliction and misery. The image surprised her. The stern expression she wore made her face longer, and her bright blue eyes almost grey in the lateness of the autumn afternoon. _A Stark through and through,_ Prince, no, King Rhaegar had said, and he had thought that when he had first seen her, although devoid of any courage and almost relieved of her own free will on the way from the Vale to the Quiet Isle. _An obedient daughter-whore of a very dangerous man._ The expression she wore now subdued her natural beauty, and the grey dress she wore helped her to look plain, for the first time since her early childhood. _Sansa Horseface,_ she thought, giggling, content about the change.

 _You will never learn, sweetling,_ the voice of the mocking bird said in her head, but she refused to heed to it.

Before continuing to the fisherfolk, at the fountain she saw a cat. An animal Arya would like, no doubt. Part of the dancing lessons her sister took and adored when their father still lived included cat catching around the Red Keep.

"Here," she told the grey furry thing and thought that the cat should bring the key to Lord Euron in his cage. In her mind, she showed the animal the way. _A crippled warg,_ she thought, remembering her dead direwolf, Lady. _Only that my stumps and scars are all on the inside._ She had no idea if the cat would obey her wishes. At any rate, Sansa was gone far enough from Lord Greyjoy and he did not know where she headed. He could not catch her or hurt her if that was his real intention.

Sansa was too late.

The fisherman's house gaped empty, and the cursed candle was gone. Only the White Book of the Kingsguard still stood above the fireplace, where Ser Jaime kept his treasured possessions. The book was open on an almost empty page that should have been about Ser Jaime himself. _Maybe if we all live, the new Kingsguard will write about Ser Jaime and the White Dragon,_ she thought, and her thought was like a vision of truth. Like when she told father that Joffrey had nothing to do with the old drunken king, being golden of hair, and she was terribly right in her childlike blindness about a handsome prince. _What does Ser Jaime have to do with the dragon then?_

A figure stirred in the street behind her when she walked out, in the shadow cast by the wall where her aunt had climbed to reach her husband, imprisoned in the high tower of his thoughts. A man's hand was on Sansa's mouth, the skin of it naturally dark, even if it had never seen the sun. Sansa yanked forward, ran, and screamed. The man followed her closely. She was lucky to run into a merry party of commoners and hedge knights walking towards the Dragon Gate with some women of less noble repute. Between them, she was safe, and no one knew her for a lady she was.

"They will open the gates now, the true king will", the leader of the party said. "He will prevail over the siege against us."

In the midst of the warm bodies, Sansa thought of a body she missed, when it was pressed next to hers in the sole presence of the wooden statue of the god of death. _He is brave,_ she thought, _he'd want me to be brave as well._

The man who attacked her at the fisherman's followed suit. His face looked empty as if he didn't have one, or as if he took his face off, if that was possible at all. And in a flicker of the last light of a day, it changed. For a short while it resembled the face of Lord's Euron red priest. But all redness was gone from him, sucked out by some monster. Only the grey and the black remained. Sansa watched him on a sly. There was purple glow in his breeches, the purple of King Rhaegar's eyes, the dark purple of the pupils of the dragon, and the evil purple of the cursed candle Ser Jaime used to have…

 _So you have it, my lord,_ Sansa thought.

The drunken party stopped in front of the Dragon Gate where a company of knights was getting ready for a sortie. They were mounted, and the tips of their lances adorned with winter roses which have rapidly grown in the streets of the capital in the two days since the mummery has started, Sansa knew. Lord Mace Tyrell was about to lead the riders. His men looked tall and handsome, knowing no fear.

There were scouts on the battlements who announced that the air was clean. The enemy withdrew to the forest behind the galleys, and the dead of Lord Euron were nowhere to be seen.

"Shouldn't we wait for the orders of the king?" a thin boy asked, but Lord Mace just waved his hand.

"The air is clean, you have heard the scouts," Lord Tyrell said.

The air did not smell clean to Sansa at all. Her lungs filled with awful premonition that opening the gates might be the mistake that was going to doom them all. No one she trusted was there, be it a man, a woman, or a dragon. And the knights all looked too confident, like poor Ser Loras when he met his death…

Sansa's attacker, coloured like darkness, crept to the door as an evil shadow. The purple glow was still within his breeches. Sansa carefully abandoned the drunken party, and followed the man on a sly, as she sometimes did in the Vale to avoid both Sweetrobin and Petyr, or recently, when she spied on Lord Euron like a humble slave. The space in front of the gates was filled with people, almost as crowded as the plaza in front of the sept during the mummery.

The huge door went open and a tiny portion of darkness entered the city. Lord Mace and his men rode to the outside, waving their shiny weapons, ignoring the prudent whinnying of their horses. Sansa had no weapon, or shield. So she donned the mask of white weirwood, the tree of the old gods. After all, it burned the priest of the red god serving her mother. She forced herself to exit the city, guided by the fickle purple glow disappearing fast on the left hand side. The gloomy long shadows approaching the riding company avoided Sansa, or her masked face. She too paid attention not to step deep into the dark immaterial shapes hurrying to meet the riders. When Sansa was far from the walls, darkness engulfed Lord Mace Tyrell and his horsmen.

Screams for mercy and help could be heard from a black void, Wild like the cries of the victims in Highgarden when the dead would breach the ring of fires and catch some of the living. But not a single wight could be seen, and the blackness between Sansa and King's Landing became thicker than when the red priest vanquished the daylight in the Reach. Sansa still saw the purple glow ahead of her, resistant to all darkness. She followed it. She would believe later on, when the Long Night was over, that the hope to reach it kept her safe. It must have been important to the invisible enemy, so they let it pass, and with it a grey-looking, stern woman who was not a danger to them.

Far behind, she could hear King Rheagar's iron-coloured voice repeated endlessly by the angry rasp of the man to whom she belonged and the never surrendering voice of Mance Rayder. "Close the gates!" three men bellowed. "They are not to open until further command!"

Not stopping to regret the destiny of Lord Mace Tyrell, Sansa stepped further away from the city. _At least I have one suitor less,_ she thought, following the glass candle. She didn't see another lithe human shape walking after her at a prudent distance: the cursed dragon-stealing wight, released from his crow cage by a stray cat.

Sansa walked tenaciously until the foreign ships came in sight, the galleys which did not belong to Daenerys Stormborn, but to a new enemy. Their lords were waiting in front of them. They were only five, and they were grey, like the sixth lord who approached them before Sansa did, boasting the candle he had stolen to his peers. It shone brightly in the darkness emanating from the lords, and it was welcome by the sighs of his kin.

"We are few," one of the grey lords said. "And one of the dragons has grown powerful. It may prove difficult to weave the spell."

"The orders are clear," said Sansa's attacker who brought them the treasure. "If we cannot capture the dragons, we have to put them to eternal rest."

Sansa did not think it was the kind of rest the dragons would have wanted. Under the deck of the galleys she noticed many eyes. Of slaves chained to their places, afraid and resigned, ready to sink with those ships. Hopeless eyes, mirroring despair from one another.

The grey lords formed a circle holding their hands. The burning candle was in the middle when they started their chanting. The faces of the slaver lords from Essos they wore when Sansa spied on them, and Lord Euron treated with them, were ranged next to the brown hull of the first galley. Skin and bone disguises were hung like gowns in a lady's dressing chamber. They took them off like the knights of Westeros would disrobe of their armour. One of the faces belonged to Moqorro, the red priest.

"If we succeed," said the grey lord who stole the candle, and who must have been Moqorro, "we may loose consciousness for a short moment."

"As long as when we wake up the dragons are dead," answered the other, stronger looking.

Sansa missed Nymeria and closed her eyes. She would be able to leap among the grey lords and run away, far enough, fast enough, taking the candle out of their reach. But no one was there. There was no hero, no knight, no king, no fierce direwolf to stop them. Only Sansa, the liar. Sansa, the coward. Sansa who remained attached to her worthless life where so many brave men and women have died.

With her eyes well closed, she could smell the wood. It was right behind the chanting lords, and its scent was not cursed, or too cold, as the forests in the upper parts of the Riverlands have become, haunted by the terror of the north. Sansa shivered at the memory. It seemed as if the forest had walked closer to the capital and the galleys over night, just like the bushes of blue roses had grown higher around Highgarden when the city was in need of protection, and dry wood to burn. Many rose bushes had perished in the fires during siege, paying their toll to safety. Deep in the wood, there was someone Sansa knew, but the presence was too far away, and she didn't feel it for such a long time, that she could not name it for what, or who, it was.

The grey lords started singing in a low voice. They didn't seem to see anything any longer, apart from the candle between them. Their song would last, Sansa believed, so she walked to the galley first. To her wonder, the slaves were alone, all their masters apparently gathered around the candle. The sellswords were nowhere to be seen. A bundle of keys lay abandoned at the seat where a man drumming the pace of rowing would sit. Sansa took the keys and started opening the chains, hurting her fingers as she did it.

The men just stared at her, some old, some younger, some no more than boys. There were no women.

"Walk to the woods," she commanded them, unaware how at that moment she was every inch a great noble lady her parents had raised her to be. "They have forgotten about you, for now."

The braver ones among the freed slaves moved to the other galleys until a silent army of unarmed men withdrew to the forest, and Sansa dared to approach the grey lords again.

The flame of the candle was less, and she had to do something.

If only she had known what.

**Sandor**

"Lady Sansa is not here," Sandor Clegane said timidly in the spacious hall belonging to the small council in the Red Keep.

"Neither is Lord Connington," said the new queen.

"I entrusted Jon and Lord Varys with an errand, while you were about to butcher Mance Rayder using the knife he gave you as a gift," Rhaegar gently teased his wife, purple eyes flaming, and the Hound had to remind himself all over again that the man who loved him as a brother was not a septon at all. More serious, the king told everyone, "Lord Varys was the first one after my wife to recognise me, I'm afraid. According to his words, he saw who I was when I asked my queen's niece in a mummery if she loved Rhaegar, in the last scene. He waited for me in the sept with Jon, as soon as Mance pushed me out of the stage."

"Sansa is not here," the Hound repeated, doggedly forgetting to call his little bird a lady.

"As long as she hasn't left the city walls she will be safe," the king said. "There is old protection in them, against the evil that had followed my sister over the seas. We should not open the gates until nightfall, and Drogon will not fly with us today. It's too dangerous."

"I agree," his sister said, coming out of nowhere, with Aegon and the dead girl from the Riverlands. "The slavers have come for only one thing."

"Dragons," Rhaegar sighed. "Those with tooth and claw, and no silver hair. Beloved sister, how many times have men tried to take your children away for you?"

"One too many, sweet brother," Daenerys returned his courtesy. "So far only Lord Euron has succeeded, with the help of his brother Victarion, the one he had forced to blow the horn in Highgarden."

"I wonder," Rhaegar said, pensive...

"We should ride out at nightfall," the Queen Lyanna said. "Make it for the galleys and gut their leaders."

"Free the slaves," Daenerys added. "The Golden Company and the Unsullied together should be able to overcome the enemy."

"Not if Euron's army attacks us as well at nightfall," Aegon suspected.

"How about... using wildfire against the wights?" Daenerys dared asking.

"No," Rhaegar said. And once again, with more decision. "No."

"Have I missed something?" the Hound heard Ser Jaime Lannister entering the small council chamber. To his mild surprise, none of the Targaryens thought it strange. "I missed all the joy and celebration, I think. So do tell me, what is the battle plan?"

"Go get yourself a horse, white knight," Mance Rayder told Jaime. "The king of you kneelers has spoken. We will ride out tonight and against who, we shall still see."

"Will you come too?" Rhaegar asked Lyanna with liquid soft fire in his voice.

"I would gladly," she said, "but I cannot. Not this time, not in this body. I will fly with you as an eagle."

"Why?" he asked, breathless, uncertain.

"I will let you know when you return," she said. The king opened his mouth to speak, but she put two thin fingers on his lips. "Don't even try to say that. You will return. The gods have not brought us together after twenty years to immediately tear us apart. They may choose to do it tomorrow, but they will not do it today."

"I will take my leave now," the Hound announced to Rhaegar, sick and empty of heart from the tender exchange he witnessed. "I will find the Lady Sansa and stand by your side at the gates before nightfall if you would have me at that place."

"I could not do it without you, brother," Rhaegar said with disarming earnestness, and the Hound knew he could not fail him.

He had to find Sansa first, and he had to find her fast.

He was so obsessed about it at that moment that it escaped his notice how he, Sandor Clegane, the grandson of the kennelmaster, was made part of the small council of the new rightful king. Not even Ser Barristan, silent next to Daenerys, opened his honourable old mouth to voice a single complaint.

**Sansa**

The flame of the glass candle was getting less and less. Sansa walked towards it, trying to overcome her fear of the grey lords as she went.

When she stepped in the circle and touched the candle, its surface was pleasantly cold, and the purple glow grew paler by every moment. She exhaled, happy that her own deed of bravery did not require _burning_ to complete the task she set herself to do.

When she tried to move the candle, the warlocks stirred. The one that used to be Moqorro tried to attack her again, but she wouldn't succumb to him, or relinquish her glass prey. Backing away, she ended in the arms of a stronger grey lord, cold and bony like she had imagined the arms of Ser Ilyn Payne would be, when he would wield her father's sword to chop her head off at the Queen Cersei's or Joffrey's command. Lifeless touch took the place rightfully belonging to the warm strong arms she had first known on the kingsroad mistaking them for Father's. She had grown since, and the warmth she felt then turned into a fire in its own right. A flame to melt the ice of her upbringing, courtesy and fears. Sansa struggled to escape the clutches of her captor but he pressed her stomach with one boneless arm and squeezed her thin neck with another. At least her face was safe, for the creature showed no love for the mask of the old gods.

"Let go of the candle! It doesn't belong to you. Let go of it and breathe," the grey lord said. "If you do not, you will not breathe for long."

It was no idle threat, yet she purposefully kept the candle to herself, and contentedly observed the sea behind the galleys. The waves lessened in the gentle evening breeze, almost to a standstill. _The sun will soon sink completely in the Blackwater Bay_ , she thought, admiring the beauty of the very last moments of the sunset, not willing to think of fingers oppressing her throat. With the final disappearance of the sun, Sansa's life felt smaller and on the end. In a blur, she could see the other grey lords hurrying to grasp the skins and faces they had left hanging on the hull of the ship. To Sansa's surprise, their skins were gone, and their lack made them turn into a frenzy of movement and issue shrill cries of murder.

They searched everywhere. Only the one holding her neck did not take part, but his grip slightly weakened. Sansa took a mouthful of air. Clutching the candle to her heart, she looked towards the city.

There, the gates opened.

Great army led by a silver-haired man and woman strode forward lazily towards the galleys, unafraid of the dead marching slowly toward it from the other side of the road, opposite of where the slavers' ships were anchored. The sellswords hired by the galley owners finally made their appearance too, from under the dark green eaves of the forest.

Half of the army which poured from King's Landing carried torches, to light their way through the ever denser darkness. _The Targaryens will not attack the dead_ , Sansa understood. Queen Daenerys must have been more moved than Sansa believed by a sight of a wight who still knew his wife and children. _Maybe she has a heart,_ Sansa thought. _Maybe she wouldn't want me to marry a Frey even if she were still the queen..._ The goal of the army defending the access to city were the empty galleys, the grey lords who whinnied without their human skins, and their well-paid sellswords armed and ready for battle.

Sansa held to the candle as she had never held onto anything in the world, except Sandor Clegane. The sweetness of her memories gave her force. _I will be brave,_ she thought, _for both of us._

"You may yet save the dragons," the lord holding her whispered. "But you will not save yourself. Let the candle, and I will let you go."

The horseman she wanted to save her was approaching fast, riding next to his king. Seeing her, he increased his sped. But he rode a different horse, not Stranger, and Sansa instinctively knew he might not make it on time, not before the creature holding her delivered on his threat. _Maybe only maidens are saved,_ she thought. _And I am no longer one._ She fought the desire to faint, struggling to keep her eyes open, and pay attention to the king and his men.

Her vision blackened for a moment. When she painfully reopened her eyes, the candle in her hand was still burning, a bit _brighter_ _purple than moments before_ _,_ if her vision had not been damaged. A lithe figure in a dark cloak sprang to life as if from nowhere, not far from Sansa. It lopped the head of the grey lord who used to be Moqorro, the red priest.

Than he cried to the army riding from the city, just before it would finally reach its enemies. "Mother of Dragons, if you pity the slaves, tell them in High Valyrian not to take off their collars! They can best stay where they are hiding in the forest ! That way my men will know that they are not the enemy, just like they do not attack their old parents, wives and children... Stay your own army in place, and they will not be harmed! I swear it by the Drowned God, and not only! I swear it by the blood of my ancestors, and the future of their children. May the doom fall on all of the Iron Islands, and kill every man, woman, and child, if I break my oath."

Lord Euron did not wait for the princess to answer. He took the head he wanted, and ran off to take his place at the head of his own army, on the deck of the red-hulled ship, which was approaching the king's army and the slavers' sellswords alike, its black sails unfolded and unforgiving.

After a moment of silence, the clearing before the galley was invaded by a thundering command, given in a strident voice of a woman which was more dragon than human, in a language Sansa was taught by the maester, yet in words she did not understand.

Sansa coughed, choking, hoping, choking again. Never losing hope. If she survived Joffrey and Petyr, she would survive a grey lord from the cities far away. He was the only one of the five lords still living who did not frantically look for a skin to wear, so he must have been as ugly and as grey as he appeared. An abomination fathering evil shadows that swallowed the ignorant knights and their leaders. Sansa almost felt sorry for the Lord Tyrell now that he no longer lived, and could not ask for her hand again.

 _The grey lord can't be more dangerous than Joffrey or Petyr_ , Sansa concluded. She gripped the candle even tighter, and she foolishly believed that the black glass object blew some air she was starting to lack in her painfully constricted chest.

"Relase it," the lord said again. "And I will let you go."

 _He is lying_ , Sansa was certain. Perhaps not obeying him was the only thing that kept him from choking her to death. That or the mask she wore, she would never know for certain.

The king's army stopped in place, surrounded by torches. Only one man kept riding forward, determined to reach Sansa _,_ maiden or not. Expectation filled her chest in place of air. If she died at that moment, she would have died content. _Sandor..._ she thought as some lady from the songs of her childhood would, to appear more noble in her death. _You_ _may not arrive on time to save me, but the candle will still be burning._

 _Or you just might_ , she changed her mind, returning sharply from the realm of her illusions to the life she still had. She prayed for salvation, hope going wild in her throat. She fought hard to leave the mortal coil of her attacker, but it only made her loose breath faster. The creature hissed and grunted, displeased with her efforts.

Sandor was only several steps of the horse's hooves away. He would reach her if she could only stand it for a little while longer.

"I would go with you this time," she stuttered weakly, half-unconscious, doubting that anyone could hear her. Tired, she stopped resisting the unavoidable, saving the last portion of air by not moving her body.

Four grey shadows around her stretched their long fingers to catch the glass candle, once it would fall from her weakening hands. As if that were something that the gods would not allow, huge four-legged bodies assaulted the greedy lords, angrier than bees defending their hive. Glistening dark grey fur mingled with the dull life lacking greyness of the godless slavers. And when the grey lords screamed, dying, being _eaten_ to death, they did it like ordinary men, all their power lost in the act of final defeat. There was only one enemy left, holding Sansa. A thin knife blade appeared between Sansa's shoulder and side then, cutting through the grey matter behind her.

The pressure on Sansa's neck was slowly less, and soon it stopped entirely.

The Hound had her in his arms when she fainted, made of honey, and not of sinew and muscle. She could still see his ruined mouth spreading in a wide joyful grin as he said to someone behind her.

"You've become a proper little horse thief, girl," he said rudely. "But at least you still know where the heart is."

A crystal clear giggle of a girl, brighter than the frozen petals of summer snow on the windows of Winterfell, rang behind Sansa's weightless back.

"Shut up, you," the girl said with striking lack of manners. "You had best not let my sister fall. Or I will find your heart as well."

Sansa's heart soared although she could see no more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who commented and left a kudos. Here we continue towards the end :-)) Planned in three more chapters if all goes well.


	50. The Laws of the Realm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the court is held

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for gore

**Rhaegar**

King Rhaegar gazed forward quietly, a black armoured man on a black horse. A black shadow lost among the black and the grey shadows of the evening; some having a life of their own, and no flesh to give them substance. He kept as close as he could to his young human sister on her white horse since they cleared the Dragon Gate. A white-headed eagle landed gently on his right arm, as the favoured left one nervously curved around the pole of the lance, that used to float broken in Trident, once. The nightfall had been upon them for a while, and the world as it was known to any of them hung in balance. _I slept for too long,_ he thought, _I do not know how to do this any longer._

_If I ever did._

As if to discredit his craven, wormy thoughts, the eagle carefully picked on his right eyebrow with the tiniest pinch of her sharp beak.

 _Yes, beloved, I've been a fool once and I'm bound to be a fool again,_ he talked to the eagle in his mind. The eagle was not a dragon and Lyanna could not hear him. Yet it was the best he could do; he could not say those words to her out loud at the head of an army. _Florian the Fool!_ Rhaegar laughed inwardly, at the both of them, Lyanna and he, and there!

All the shadows seemed lighter and less invincible.

 _If I was not helped by my travelling companions, I would have never stood here as myself, honouring my heritage, and much less seen a true dragon..._ he added a measure of justice to his thoughts. He could sense Drogon's presence behind them, safely perched on the high stone walls either built or reinforced by their common ancestors. Meeting him was worthy of a lifetime of solitude.

The bird just croaked, undeterred, towards the long ships anchored in front of them, looming ever closer in their line of sight, as they advanced slowly towards the waterfront. _Fearless, that's what you are,_ Rhaegar thought of his wife again, _no matter what you say or think of yourself. They built you a pyre and you refused to burn, you refused to give the vultures the pleasure of seeing you broken. You just looked up, fancying yourself a true eagle who would fly free. And maybe, with the strange customs of your people up north, a part of you would have flown away. But I bless the gods, Lyanna, for bringing me to you on time, before the eagle was the only one left..._

There was only one dark cloud left hanging in the sky of his mind. With jealousy he knew he had to fight, and temper, to avoid falling victim to the madness of his house, Rhaegar still feared what Lyanna would not tell him before he rode to battle, again. _And you're still keeping your secrets, even from me..._ He could only hope that the Blackwater would not become another Trident for the House Targaryen.

The king and his sister, Princess Daenerys, led a well-ordered army of the Unsullied and the Golden Company, surrounded by torch bearers from all sides. Aegon, Ser Barristan, and Mance Rayder had already cautiously slipped away from the ranks behind them, melting into shadows, with a small company of men-at-arms. The nightfall had its blessings, as Rhaegar and Daenerys hoped it would, devising a battle strategy; the small vanguard seemed to have gone away unnoticed. Ser Jaime Lannister followed them of his own free will, without being commanded to do so. They departed before Lord Euron's sudden change of heart, and his offer to help them. Rhaegar had a moment to wonder briefly where Lady Brienne was, for he had not seen her since the mummery, before returning all of his attention to the inhuman ending of the clash in front of him and Daenerys.

The path they faced gaped empty from where they were to the galleys of the slavers from across the sea. In front of one of them, largest of all, a pack of at least three dozen wolves led by a direwolf Rhaegar knew so well as the brother of the Faith, was sharing and almost finishing a meal consisting of several grey looking figures such as Rhaegar had never seen in his life. Not as a Prince of Dragonstone, nor as a man of the Seven. Daenerys appeared content with the sight. Her lips curled up imperceptibly, the gesture oddly reminding Rhaegar of their father when he was a younger man, and occasionally in a good mood.

"You have seen these… grey people… before, haven't you?" he asked her.

"I have," she said. "And I would call them blue, not grey. They drink a potion called night shade for their lips to become, or to remain blue, I have already forgotten the exact reason. Though grey could be the apt way of describing them, here, in this land devoid of light that is supposed to be our home. Eternal sunlight reigned in the city where I had met them, and the colours of all things were different. They are called the warlocks, and they wield magic. When I was in a need of sustenance, and allies, and knowledge, in the ancient city of Qarth, their blue mouths rained with prophecies and promises about the dragons, enticing me to accept their help. But in the end all they showed me were mere visions, or so I thought at the time…" she said, staring deeply in her brother's eyes. Rhaegar admired how her eyes mirrored his own, albeit less dark and harbouring a lesser amount of past sorrows. Yet, born as a fugitive, she must have suffered too, Rhaegar was certain. He hoped that one day she would trust him enough to tell him about her life.

"Won't you tell me more of those visions?" he asked of her, politely, as if he were still a lowborn in comparison to her.

"Maybe. In a while," Daenerys continued saying what she could, at that moment. "Their promises were empty. All that they had served me in the end was an attempt to take my life. Drogon was very small then, but he repaid them in kind. Many died on that day, but not all."

"It would appear that it is the first time these… _warlocks,_ have met a direwolf or even a wolf…" Rhaegar speculated. The eagle sat peacefully on his shoulder, crowing with pride.

"I've never seen wolves in Essos," his sister said. "I know they live over there, just like here, from Viserys' stories. But until Ser Barristan taught me a bit more about the great houses of Westeros I thought of all the wolves as the Usurper's dogs…" his sister's voice became tinged with embarrassment. "I was so ignorant of so many things."

"Who wasn't?" Rhaegar responded rhetorically before his own lips curved to a smile similar to their father's. He fought it, not wishing to look like Aerys, ever. "Just like Lord Euron comes from one of the poorest corners of Westeros, and despite being as highborn as their mothers can make them on the Iron Islands, he's as ignorant of the old Valyrian as if he were a bastard from Flea Bottom. I heard _everything_ you told the slaves… You have grown wise, and dangerous, sweet sister. If they obey you, our men will have an easier task, and we are one step closer to victory. "

"I had to do so," Dany said, reining her horse in. "It remains to be seen whether the deceit was necessary."

"On this, I am with you, sister," Rhaegar said. "We could not risk taking Lord Euron on his word. I, for one, will find difficult to accept anyone's, apart from my own wife's, after the treason of Prince Lewyn Martell."

"We will wait here," Daenerys decided, perhaps sensing Rhaegar's inner doubts and disquiet. "It's a good place as any." And so they did. The army slowly halted, a slow long trail of faces and steel. They waited patiently, surrounded by a ring of torches, under the starless night sky. A pale moon started rising after the warlocks had fallen, defying and dissipating the shadows they had cast around the city. Pearl-coloured moonlight joined the torches in bathing the outskirts of the capital in a ghastly glow. It spread over the lands, the galleys, the walking dead and their stranded ship. It hovered over the sellswords crawling out of the darkness of the woods, and the silver hair of the true king and his sister. The dead advanced slowly towards the sellswords, in utter silence, led by Silence and its dead captain, ignoring the army from King's Landing, as if it were not there. Sellsword companies crept further out from the woods, baring weapons of all kinds, confident in their number which surpassed the dead. With great force they attacked, and with cries of slaughter.

But the dead had more power despite the soft elegance of their movement under the wing of Silence. Slowly, the dread of their presence and the sheer strength they possessed washed out all resistance of the paid warriors from afar. They devoured the flesh of the living, turning it into carrion fodder. Rhaegar forced himself to study the carnage, as he would observe an ugly wound susceptible to heal. His breath accelerated when he saw a change from the pattern he had witnessed earlier in Highgarden. With the defeat of the warlocks, and Euron's false priest, the dead remained dead. They were not rising as fresh walking corpses and moving limbs eager to devour their former companions in arms on Euron's command.

Rhaegar pitied the sellswords, although he knew what war was, better than many. They had to be defeated one way or the other, but that did not make matters any prettier. Saddened, he turned his face away.

And saw a small riding party; two galloping horses and a direwolf left a tangle of fur and teeth where the warlocks were being feasted upon. They would join the king's ranks before either the advancing dead or the fugitive sellswords losing ground would make it to the galleys. The king's heart forgot the war and widened beyond measure. Sandor Clegane carried Lady Sansa in his arms, as if she were a fallen red autumn leaf. His other niece was close behind, on the Hound's horse. _Awake!_ _A day and a night for miracles,_ Rhaegar thought, joyful, fire flickering in his veins. He thanked the Father as he would do when he thought he was a monk. And only at that moment he started to believe they could be victorious. He almost believed in Euron Greyjoy's honour until he remembered how his lordship had killed his own brother, hoping to conquer the power that was never his to attain.

When the torch bearers stepped aside to let the riders into the king's presence, Rhaegar patted the eagle and smiled, greeting them. His unease of what the night would still bring melted faster than ice in spring in the south, at the sight of his brother and his lady, safely back where Rhaegar could protect them, as was his duty, for the time being. He immediately bent over Lady Sansa, as a healer, not a king. She was alive, and it meant that with time she would be well. He gently touched the burning glass candle in her cold stiff hands, wondering if she knew what she was holding and what she hindered by grasping it. Sansa's tight grip on the black glass finally relented under the warm touch of the king, heated by the blood of the dragon streaming through his veins.

"I will tend to her myself," he reassured his brother then, and the Hound's ashen, burned face regained a semblance of calm at those words. "I haven't yet lost a life that could be saved, as you well know, in all the years that I prayed and healed. For now, just hold her a little bit longer. She may need no more than warmth."

His younger niece dismounted and stood next to her wolf, in apprehension and rebellion at the same time. She glanced at Daenerys and bluntly addressed a princess of blood. "Last thing I remember before opening my eyes in the woods, I was on an errand to kill you. I was no one, then."

"But you didn't. You chose not to. Why? I was hoping I would get a chance to ask you this for a long time," Daenerys said, not showing any trace of slight. "Shall I have your answer, my lady, or are you no one still?"

"I'm not a lady. I am Arya, of the House Stark," the girl said bravely, looking a bit like Lyanna in her younger years did. Yet her cold, almost cruel bearing and some sharp facial features were entirely her own. "I tried hard to be no one, but in the end I failed. Like in all else. As to why I could not kill you, I do not know. I raised my sword, and before I could lower it, it felt as if I would be killing my own kin. After that, I woke up in the woods on his horse" she said, pointing at the Hound, "with a knife in my hand, and an ugly grey man was killing my sister. He, he's a killer, a _murderer_ of children," she said with blunt dislike, never stopping to point at Sandor Clegane. "But he still watched over me in his way when there was no one else. And even back then he was a fool for my stupid sister. I saw he'd not make it to her on time. I did the only thing I learned how to do well."

"Kill," Rhaegar permitted himself to say.

"Kill," his younger niece agreed without hesitation.

"And who paid for the taking of my sister's life to the guild of the Faceless Men," Rhaegar asked. "I assume you belonged to them if you were no one. In my youth, they also existed, but few had enough coin to buy their favours."

"Now, that, what you just said, is plain wrong," Lady Arya said. "I don't remember my stay with them as thoroughly as I would wish. It's like an odd dream now, with so many things in it that I can't understand. But it's not the gold that counts. It is a wish for a life to be taken. And if the god of death finds it well, then it's done."

"Who made a wish then?" Dany asked.

"I don't know, not for certain," Arya said. "There were some men from Westeros who came to the House of Black and White and prayed. Later that day they also visited the Iron Bank of Braavos. A girl who was no one followed them until they boarded a ship, a dromond, I think, and left. The day after I was sent on an errand to take your life. The servants of the temple of the Many-Faced God gave me back a face telling me it was my own. They wouldn't give me a false name for the task as is their custom, and they instructed me to retrieve a weapon of my own to complete it, for it was the only weapon that would avail me against… that would fortify me to take the life the god wanted," Arya's voice faltered. "But in the end I couldn't take your life and my sword is missing..."

"I kept it for you," Daenerys said distantly.

"Thank you," Arya said, suddenly apt at courtesy.

"Maybe it's not her life your god wanted, girl," the Hound barked ferociously. "Maybe you're as stupid as you think your sister to be."

"Wait," Arya exclaimed with fear, recognising the high stone walls behind Sandor Clegane when he finished speaking. "This is King's Landing! You have captured Sansa and me for the Lannisters! Who are you?" she asked the king and his sister. "Your hair is silver, not gold!"

Daenerys gazed at Rhaegar, at a loss for words.

"I'm your uncle," he said.

"Uncle Edmure," Arya said after a while. "I never imagined you this way. Didn't they kill you too, the Freys and the Boltons, at the Red Wedding?"

The king stretched his spine to appear more confident. "My name is Rhaegar Targaryen, not Edmure Tully. This is my sister, Daenerys Stormborn."

"You kidnapped my aunt before I was born!" Arya shouted immediately, with both anger and amazement. "Didn't you die on the Trident?"

Rhaegar was enthralled with Arya's eyes as they darkened, reminding him of the lady he loved so well. But before she could and most certainly would have done something uncalled for, like attacking the king, if she were anything like his wife in deed and not only in looks, both the eagle and Nymeria barred her way, affectionately detaining her skinny form, in an embrace of undulating fur and flapping feathers.

"There's your aunt," Rhaegar said about the eagle. "Just like you can be in your wolf if you wish. She will tell you of her life when we return home."

"What is... home?" Arya asked, lost between the two animals, less certain about her intentions all of a sudden, and sounding much younger than she was. A child yearning for the home it had lost.

"The Red Keep," the king answered with melancholy. "The beauty of its warmly-coloured walls has been stained too many times with blood that should have never been spilled. Yet it is still my home. I have no other. And I hope to wash some of the injustice away, in the time that will still be given to me."

Arya remained mute, pondering the king's words.

Rhaegar gazed forward again remembering he was king now, expected to lead in war.

The galleys were leaving, some of them, at least. The surviving sellswords manned the oars, abandoned by the slaves. They needed no drummer to row away as fast as the force and the span of their arms could take them. Some dead jumped into the water to form a pursuit, but a deep, vengeful voice from Silence called them back to the shore. The dead regrouped behind the black sails of Lord Euron's ship. Doggedly, they started marching towards the king and his army, slow, yet determined to face it.

"Now," the king whispered.

Daenerys lifted both of her slender arms in the evening air, and called the slaves to come and honour their mother with flames, in High Valyrian. And she would free them as she promised she would when she had asked them to keep their collars for a bit longer. The king's torch bearers moved in a position between the army and the dead. The woods came alight at Dany's call, with branches starting to burn in the arms of the slaves. And a flood of men freed from the galleys approached the dead from the back, until they were fully surrounded by a ring of fire. Ser Barristan, Mance Rayder and Aegon led them, from centre and on both wings. Ser Jaime Lannister was in the first ranks too, but in place of a torch or a sword he dragged six cursed gowns of human skin, bearing the appearance of the slaver lords from Essos from face to toe, except that they contained no flesh.

The king sat his lance aside and handed the glass candle to his sister. He reached for a large saddle bag behind him, and took out the horn of the dragonlords. In his harp-loving hands, those of its rightful master, the horn was cool like fresh water. _Yet I would never be able to touch it, or blow it of my own free will, if my brother was not willing to sacrifice his life to lift the curse laid upon it,_ Rhaegar knew. In a corner of an eye, he noticed that Lord Euron knelt on Silence, weapons dropped in front, palms of his dead hands turned forward in sign of surrender. He didn't even bother to put a bandage over the eye he had lost as a living man, or to hide his condition of a corpse from any living ironborn he may have still commanded.

The Elder Brother would have forgiven him. Rhaegar, the Prince of Dragonstone would have believed him. But King Rhaegar could not afford to trust. Not when he was close to victory and the end of bloodshed he never desired.

The king's hands curled around the red rings of the Horn which survived the doom of Valyria. As a true dragonlord of old, he raised it and he blew.

He blew and the sound travelled over the kingswood, the sea, the roads leading to the capital and its high walls. It was not ominous and deep as it had been in Highgarden. It was crystal and shrill, and it called. It called forth. And it called far. It could be heard as far north as the High Heart, as far north as the Wall.

The dragons came then, all three of them, hearing their lord's call. First came the black one from the walls of King's Landing. Then came the green one with a thin layer of white snow and ice tinging the tips of its bright green scales. Rhaegar hoped he would have brought his son from the Wall, or beyond it, but there were some things not even the dragons were able to achieve. _We will go and find Jon together,_ he promised Lyanna, who was now on her willful niece's head.

And finally the white dragon came from the still warm south, carrying a tall unconscious blond woman with prickly hair on its back. Her cheeks were red from flight few men could stomach, and her large soft hands grasped tightly a blue oval stone.

At the unexpected sight, Rhaegar straightened up in the saddle and lowered the horn. The joy in his soul was unequalled and for two seconds he believed he could conquer the world.

Laughing, he told his sister.

"Daenerys, look!" he said, but there was no need for it. His sister's eyes were already on a blue stone. "How…?" she asked. "Where…?"

"Lady Brienne will surely tell us when she wakes up," Rhaegar observed. "It is by no means an easy feat to tame and ride a dragon with no blood to guide your actions."

Then the king turned to Lord Euron in his surrender, and asked in a voice of his father before he could control it and make it sound like his own. "Speak, kraken," his words spurted like dragonfire. "And tell me why I should spare you from burning?"

"I have laid down my weapons before you called your dragons as you have well seen," Euron said. "I took care of the sellswords for you, and I spared their slaves. I kept my end of the bargain."

"You have laid down your weapons _after_ ordering your army to march on me, " Rhaegar contradicted, "and _before_ being surrounded by fire."

"That much is true," Euron conceded. "In defeat, the ironborn do not yield. They fight until the last man dies."

"That much is true in what books and scrolls record about your house," Rhaegar admitted. "So why did you lay down your weapons then? Why did you go against your barbarian custom?"

"I am not asking for mercy for myself," Euron said. "I ask for mercy for the army I created in my foolishness. You will say, why should we pity the living dead? They are dead already! Take my word, for I have tasted this condition, and it is a curse! Yet it is still a life when all the sweetness and taste of things has been irreparably lost. The beggar and the noble alike will cling to such life as he has. Spare them, and they will fight for you. You may yet need their strength when you head far up north…"

Mind in a turmoil, Rhaegar observed how his sister approached him and said: "I have walked with the dead, brother, when you and Drogon left me to save your wife. They possess… some understanding. And what of Lady Jeyne, she has helped us all! She sensed that the House Tyrell had tidings of where Lord Euron was, and where he was taking our dragons. If you sentence them to burn, what of her? What of Aegon? Shouldn't you judge everyone by the same measure of law?"

Rhaegar considered her words.

And against his will he remembered a corpse of Ser Ilyn Payne, severely maimed by his father in life. Aerys had Ser Ilyn's tongue cut out when the unhappy knight praised his liege lord, Tywin Lannister. Yet Ser Ilyn nonetheless may have kept his honour in death, just like his cousin Podrick believed he might have wished. The dead tongueless knight kidnapped the Elder Brother of all people in the riverlands, when the wights and the white walkers attacked the future king's party. To kill him faster… Or… Or perchance in his cursed condition Ser Ilyn was able to recognise him and he decided to protect the Prince of the Dragonstone from the true enemy… from the white walkers who urged their dead to get the _monks_ before anyone else, as a few brothers who lived through that night could tell. The Others had followed the Elder Brother to the woods as if they knew very well who he was when he didn't know it himself yet… Until Sandor Clegane killed one of them who would have finished off Rhaegar then and there with the obsidian pendant. And Rhaegar returned the favour by throwing the Valyrian steel dagger in the heart of the other enemy who wrenched a chunk of flesh from the Hound's massive shoulder…

Rhaegar knew he might never find answers to his questions, but they still lingered on. They could not be easily ignored or forgotten.

Lady Sansa chose that moment to stir in the Hound's arms. The king recalled her words from the Quiet Isle, when for the first time in twenty years he became angry like a _man_ at Petyr Baelish, thinking he deserved death. The words Ned Stark must have given his daughter mingled with mother's milk: "It is not for us to decide who lives and who dies." She had said so, and the Prince of Dragonstone within the monk had stirred back to life, only to wake up fully weeks later, on the stairs where Ned Stark had been murdered like a traitor he never was. Yet the truth he taught his daughter remained. If there was to be peace, life and death should be governed by the laws, and not by a whim of any man, even if he was a true king.

"We will return to the Dragon Gate," the king commanded. "There, I will hold court in the open and pass my judgement for certain crimes, past and present, in the light of the laws of the realm to the best of my abilities. All who so wish may come and watch."

"I hereby summon to my presence Lord Euron Greyjoy! Mance Rayder! Ser Jaime Lannister! Lord Walder Frey! Lady Olenna Tyrell! His Holiness the High Septon! And the Lord Paramount of the Trident Petyr Baelish!"

"Those whom I have named can choose to come willingly, or they will be brought by force…"

He gave his sister a pleading look. Daenerys understood and in a few chosen words in Valyrian, her commander, Grey Worm, formed a company of men for each person the king summoned.

Rhaegar was not surprised when Mance Rayder immediately started in the direction of the city. Nor when Ser Jaime Lannister whistled to Viserion who landed next to him, with Lady Brienne still resting on the dragon's back. Ser Jaime embraced the dragon's snout, told him something, and walked to the city as well, alone and without the sister with whom he had come to the world. Rhaegar's lips curved with the certainty of knowledge.

And went slightly open with new questions, when Lord Euron approached one of the brothers he killed, Aeron Damphair, the one who used to be the priest of the Drowned God of the ironborn. He didn't spare a glance for his other dead brother, Victarion, who stood proudly on a side, always the second in command, a great captain of the dead, as he was the great captain of the living. Aeron accompanied Euron to the shoreline, pushed him knee deep into the sea, and poured a copious amount of salty water on Euron's head speaking some words of their strange faith. Then, the summoned kraken departed towards the Dragon Gate as well, carrying no arms, only something that resembled a rather large bag of turnips.

When Rhaegar himself rode back to the city, he stopped to regret the sight of battered heads and limbs soiling the ground in front of the gates. Heaps of putrid flesh, still bleeding, that used to be Lord Mace Tyrell and his best knights, devoured by the evil shadows of the warlocks. For all the cruelty and unchecked ambition of the late Warden of the South, few deserved such death. He wondered how many of the dead shared their commander's goals, and how many were just obeying his misplaced orders, not having known any better in their life of the men sworn to his House.

 _How many more will have to suffer and die before we finally have peace?_ Rhaegar thought, and then, his thoughts were churning. His guts were _burning_. Drogon obeyed the command the king could not force himself to utter, not even in his mind. Soon, dragonfire caught the drying grass and absorbed the corpses and their armour, purging the space in front of the gates where the court was to be held, granting the summer knights of the south the only reward that could still be given to them...

Rest.

**Sansa**

Sansa was pleased by the warmth she would not expect in dying. _I must have been taken to seven heavens,_ she hoped, inhaling rapidly a scent of the sweat she knew, and it made her open her eyes. She would have hummed from pleasure if it wasn't a very unladylike thing to do.

Two pairs of grey eyes bore into hers, one restless, belonging to a man holding her close to his heart, and another calm like water, less childish than when she had seen it before.

"Arya," she said, "you have grown."

"So have you," her sister said and grinned with malice. "I thought I would find you in the arms of another handsome prince when I returned."

"I am glad you found me so…" Sansa said, blushing. "…That you returned, I mean," she corrected her unseemly remark, and Sandor's grip stiffened. Sansa blushed again, not wanting to cause her lover any grievance, real or imagined, so she ventured on even more unseemly grounds. "And I would not have you find me in anyone else's arms."

"Than I am thrilled I didn't put my dancing lessons in practice with him when he asked me to," Arya said, laughing clearer than the water could fall. "I can't believe you picked up a dog just like King Robert counselled Father when they killed Lady…" Her sister's long face lost mirth when she spoke of their father, and Sansa did not feel offended by her rudeness. Or by her remark on dancing she did not quite understand. Because the Hound's embrace grew even tighter, and his eyes wore a smirk of hope where once only anger had its dwelling.

Sansa took in her surroundings. They were in front of the gates where Queen Cersei's trial by combat had been held, well placed in the first row of the nobles waiting on the king in his court. Torches lit the night from all sides, some stuck in the city walls, some carried by the men on the ground, and some by the onlookers on the battlements. The hour was growing late, and the people tired, yet it seemed that every living soul in the city had gathered together to witness the end of a day full of miracles for some, and grief for others.

King Rhaegar sat in front, on a seat less noble, and less frightening than the Iron Throne. It made him look like an ordinary knight, and not a king in whose hands the power was laid, to grant life, or to take it. He wore no helm, nor crown, and his silver hair spilled freely on his black armour. His Queen of Love and Beauty, _Aunt Lyanna,_ Sansa remembered with joy, sat demurely at his side, garbed in blue and grey. _The blue of the winter roses for Rhaegar, and the grey for the House Stark…_ Sansa marvelled. Her hair followed that of her husband, and also by coincidence the custom of the north, in contrast with the elaborate combing styles of the south. Sansa admired her aunt's choices. Only her tiny stature made her appear moderately below the king, just as the most conservative propriety would demand of the queen.

"What is going on?" Sansa inquired, and the Hound replied quietly. "His Grace will hold court and pass judgement. Knowing him as we do, he may well forgive them all."

"It is the king's right, to carry out the laws," Sansa said, not knowing what she wanted. Too old on the inside to expect justice, she nevertheless hoped for a resemblance of it.

"Then I hope he will let his dragons devour the prisoners, starting with Lord Walder Frey," Arya said with hatred the Hound once spoke with in the Red Keep.

"Let us hear," Sansa said, standing up between them. The face she used to know as the Elder Brother's looked as if he would not do either of those two things.

Sansa missed the Hound's closeness as soon as she had left it. But her strength was back, and it was only proper that she would behave according to her station. She steeled herself, and listened.

"People of the Seven Kingdoms, lords and ladies, all of you who are wiling to listen," King Rhaegar spoke. "My beloved sister Daenerys extended her royal pardon to all, before the mummery which has given me back my life so that I can devote it to the good of the realm. And since you have acknowledged my claim to the Iron Throne, I see that no other choice lies before me than to uphold and apply the laws we have. Or I will be no more than another Usurper. To this regard, I have summoned some among you for whom I believe that they have committed deeds which need to be known to all, at the very least, and some of them may demand punishment according to our laws."

"Lord Euron Greyjoy, step forward," Princess Daenerys called the first prisoner, when the king gave her leave to do so. Just like when Sansa saw him through the bars of the crow cage, both of his eyes were visible, dead, and black.

"A wight!" one of the surviving ironborn cried in distress. "Base treachery! We elected a wight on a kingsmoot! Lord Euron missed an eye in life! A dead man cannot be our lord!"

"Lord Euron," Daenerys said, ignoring the roars of contempt. "You have brought a horn from the ruins of Valyria to the Iron Islands. You gave it as a present to your brother Victarion not telling him what it was or that it took your natural life away from you. Then you sent Victarion after me at the head of the Iron Fleet, to capture me, and three dragons, with the intention to enslave us. He caught two dragons for you and you enslaved them, for a while. You followed a man who said he was a priest of the red god and whose presence gave you power to resurrect others you killed, and force them to be your soldiers. What have you to say in your defence?"

"Aye, I did all that, and more, as you well know" said the cursed kraken in an angry voice which resounded in the darkness, almost blowing out the torches nearest to him by the mighty blow of his hatred. "I will not deny what I did. I would have taken you to wife by force if I could. The kingdoms belonged to no one then! No one had a rightful claim to the Iron Throne. Why should not a kraken be chosen king, by the force of his arms, if a bastard stag could? Have your dragons burn me, princess, and be done with this mockery! I have tasted my revenge."

Unmoving, he emptied the content of the bag he carried at Daenerys' feet. A grey wrinkled head with blue lips rolled down in the muddy ground. Sansa had to stop the urge to retch, remembering what they did to the head of her brother Robb. She fought hard to keep her shoulders straight, as a lady should, and hide her discomfort.

"This is my gift to you, Silver Princess," Euron said in a changed voice, but what was in it then, Sansa could not name. "His name was Moqorro. And if he could, he would have enslaved you all, you and your brother, and all of your dragons. He would have taken you back to Valyria, to keep feeding the everlasting fires by your old blood, enhancing the powers of his wicked kind! He would have succeeded if your knightly _dragon friend,_ Sandor Clegane, did not outsmart me and defeat me in Highgarden, before Moqorro or I could discover you or your living brother and force you to blow the horn when it was still cursed by the warlocks… I understood too late what they wanted from me. What they used me for."

Lord Euron nodded to Sandor Clegane when he finished speaking, and Sansa thought he may have _smiled_ at her. A genuine smile, not a dead one. A gratitude where there should have been none.

"Not a bloody knight," Sandor had muttered when Euron spoke, but only Sansa could hear him.

King Rhaegar spoke then, and there was not a shadow of the Elder Brother left in his kingly voice, despite the lowness and the simplicity of his chosen seat. "Lord Euron is right in that there was no rightful king on the Iron Throne when he aspired to kingship. By the strict understanding of the laws, anyone could lay a claim, or recruit an army in any way, forced or not, as long as that condition lasted."

"A question for the accused, if I may, Your Grace," Daenerys inquired, and the king stopped speaking.

"Lord Greyjoy," she said, standing more beautiful than ever in front of his dead lordship. "Why were you late in seeing through the deceit of the warlock who put on a skin of the priest of a Lord of Light in your service, to better fool you with his prophecies?"

"Do not ask me that, princess," Lord Euron objected. "The laws do not forbid a prisoner to die with dignity, if he is so able, without sullying his breeches."

"I hold no interest in what was once between your thighs, _wight,_ " Daenerys said with disdain of a woman wedded and bedded, for whom men had no secrets. "I would have your answer before a sentence is passed. Or I will urge my kingly brother to let the dragons burn the army for which you have pleaded mercy. Before they burn you."

"I hoped… I hoped…" Euron started and he could not finish, the humiliation of what he had to say making him bend deeply to the mud stirred by autumn rains, appearing more like a corpse he was than he ever did before. "I had dared hope..." he said, lifting his gaze to face his King's Justice clad in yellow silks, towering above him in a position of might, despite the fragile slenderness of her built. "I hoped beyond hope that if I could force you and prove to you that I was still a man, maybe the true dragon blood of yours could call me back to life. And that maybe you would forgive me, in time, and call me your own. Give me your… affection. I couldn't think clearly of anything else. This hope drove my ambition, and madness, and all I did."

Having said those words, the black gaze of the vanquished wight dropped to the ground, and he was utterly unable to look up any longer.

King Rhaegar and Princess Daenerys exchanged a glance before the king stood up and spoke, thin as a birch, yet stronger than the wind. Stern and with balance, he spoke: "For as much as you may deserve it, the sentence of death cannot be passed against one already dead. And as to burning you into nothingness, it could prove to be a reward and not a punishment to your kind. You pleaded mercy for the army of the dead you created of your own free will. Yet turning free men and women into slavery is a crime under the laws of the Seven Kingdoms so you ought to be punished..."

"This is then the punishment I will deal to you, Euron Greyjoy. You will bend the knee to my rule. And you will lead your army in war at my side as I command it and see fit. And you will be seeing my sister every day, more beautiful than the sun, and one day wed to a good man, and a true lord, as you were not able to be. You will never address a word to her, and you will remain what you are, a dead body condemned to solitude until your existence comes to an end. Those are the terms of your punishment. You may refuse. If you do, you leave me no choice. You will watch every single wight in your army burn, before you are burned yourself."

The dead kraken silently bent the knee, unable to look up, his gesture of acceptance as clear and as proper as it could be performed.

Mance Rayder walked forward next, not waiting to be summoned.

"Mance Rayder," King Rhaegar said flatly, sounding almost like the Hound in his most impassive moods, "you were proclaimed King-beyond-the Wall by the people living beyond it. You led them against the Wall in order to settle them in the safety behind it, willing what was best for them. You were defeated in battle, yet you won in what you sought. My son, who was elected Lord Commander of the Night's Watch allowed your people in the Seven Kingdoms. As I would have done myself. The laws of the realm cannot be used to sentence you to death for treason because you never willingly proclaimed yourself king in any part of the Seven Kingdoms. What say you?"

"I have never proclaimed myself king, on either side of the Wall, that much is true," Mance said. "Yet murder is a crime on both sides. And not burning a man you kill is a crime against the old gods on my side of the Wall."

"The man you murdered," Rhaegar said, "was it in the Seven Kingdoms?"

"No," Mance shook his head and opened his mouth to continue.

"Than I have no power to decide over your punishment," the king ruled, and the queen stood up on his side, her grey eyes urging the wildling not to speak.

"If the lands beyond the Wall are ever made part of the Seven Kingdoms," Rhaegar said, "and if by the grace of the gods I am still king, only then, I will be able to rule. Whatever you did, it is between you and any gods you keep. You are free to go and do as you please."

Mance Rayder stepped aside, abashed, never bending a knee, since nobody thought to ask it of him.

"Ser Jaime Lannister," King Rhaegar called out.

Ser Jaime came out in a simple tunic, crimson and gold. He had left the white armour of the Kingsguard behind. Yet his breeches and boots were black, something Sansa would find more fitting for the Hound, or even King Rhaegar. The odd attire, and a carelessly arrogant posture to match it, drew all attention to him, even of those who could resist the handsomeness he possessed with inborn grace.

"You have removed the white armour with which you chose to serve the king, years ago," Rhaegar observed. "Yet the crime I am supposed to judge you for is the murder of the king you were sworn to protect, wearing that same armour. What say you?"

"I have done as you say, Your Grace," Ser Jaime said with ease, "as I have fathered bastards with my sister, to sit as usurpers the Iron Throne, and threw a boy from the high windows of Winterfell to protect that secret. I stand defenceless before you, for a sentence long due."

"Haven't you recently come to know something about yourself that would… _mitigate_ your punishment?" Princess Daenerys asked, and Sansa surprised herself by how much she did not want to see Ser Jaime die, laws or not. He was almost a _friend_ to Sandor, and he seemed to be a gentle husband to Lady Brienne.

A gurgle sounded from behind Sansa's back, followed by the voice of Thoros of Myr. "Lady Catelyn Stark confirms that the Kingslayer tried to kill her son Brandon, a small boy, to hide his _unnatural_ relation with his sister."

Arya grasped Sansa's elbow and whispered. "In a dream, I have seen our mother dead, floating in the river." Sansa embraced her sister. "And so she was," Sansa said. "But her body was somehow brought back. They call her Lady Stoneheart now, and all she knows is vengeance…" Sansa's choice of words made Arya shiver, and the older one of the two sisters could only hold the younger one closer, wishing what she said to go away, if it had hurt her sister so.

"Lady Catelyn Stark was killed at the Red Wedding," King Rhaegar said. "The creature for which you speak wanted to take the king's justice in her own hands. Yet she had done no other crime since, and I cannot sentence to death what has already died. That is the only reason I didn't summon her before my face. Shouldn't she weep for the loss of a noble husband who _never_ betrayed her? Shouldn't she weep for not loving my son Jon, who was _never_ her husband's bastard? Shouldn't she stop desiring blood and think of her own sins and of what may be truly important, in life and in death? She would have burned me, a monk of the Faith, in the Riverlands, for defending Ser Jaime's right to a trial. And she would have burned his innocent lady wife who did nothing against her kin, and who spent months riding in the riverlands looking for her daughters! I wonder what your lady would have said then if her intentions were fulfilled, and if I rose from the dead before her eyes… Would she burn me again and again, to quench her thirst for revenge?"

"If I am to be king, I will yearn for justice, and peace, not for vengeance."

The king was shaking with rage on his legs, almost spitting fire through his human nostrils. The queen approached him then, softer than the first snow could fall. She pulled him back to the seated position, gently tapping his armoured forearm.

"Thank you for your words, Your Grace," Jaime said. "Yet the result of either justice or vengeance, when it comes to my person and your father, strikes me to be pretty much the same."

"Not quite," Princess Daenerys said, signalling something to one of the Unsullied standing close at hand.

Lady Brienne was brought in, in a litter Daenerys would sometimes use, Sansa remembered, but it was now covered in light blue, and not in yellow silks the princess preferred. She seemed tired, barely awake, and in her hands she held a blue oval stone.

"Do you know what this is?" Daenerys asked, and Ser Jaime appeared offended. As if he were certain she was mocking him, but could not comprehend the reason.

"A stone," he said, "a stone one of your dragons wanted from the treasury in Tarth."

"And who retrieved the _stone_ for the dragon?" the princess continued, delaying Ser Jaime's agony.

"I did," he said.

"You did that, when the dragon by coincidence chose _you_ as his rider. Or do you deny that of all people Viserion chose you to ride him and do his bidding?"

Ser Jaime had no answer to that.

"Ser Jaime Lannister," King Rhaegar ceremoniously addressed the man before him, as if the proper treatment would return him the gift of speech. "When I left the capital and rode to the Trident, when I still desired victory, and before Prince Lewyn Martell spoke treason to my ears, what did I tell you?"

"That everything would be different once you would return, Your Grace," Ser Jaime found the grace to stutter.

"And if I returned with life, I would have imprisoned my father and sentenced _him_ to death by the laws, for the crime of ordering the King's Landing to burn," the king said. "The king has no leave to kill his people who committed no crime. You were only guilty of passing the just sentence which was not yours to pass… And I _should_ sentence you to death by our laws, if the hand of the gods would not stay my hand in this matter. For I cannot sentence you, if I want to remain in life myself… " the king's voice faltered.

"Kinslaying is worse than kingslaying in the eyes of the gods, is it not?" Queen Lyanna continued where King Rhaegar had stopped, and the multitude approved of her words in sighs and quiet nods. Those were the first words she said since the Court was being held. "The king and I, we both know that you have understood who you are some time after the mummery, if you have not suspected it before. Yet you remain a Lannister to the core, like your mother was, and you are too proud to admit what you now know, and plead for your life. So we will let your lady wife plead in your stead, and only then the people will hear the king's judgement."

"No, please," Jaime said, humiliated.

But it was too late.

Lady Brienne stood up, somewhat shaken in body but not in honour.

"You have hinted at the truth yourself, Your Grace, as did Her Grace the Queen. When you spoke to all of us about your past, you mentioned that King Aerys II, your father, was told to have hurt my lord husband's mother... And that Lord Tywin Lannister took his revenge by betraying him when he had a chance. My lord husband, he… He _loved_ his sister since they were children. His love was pure at first, and not carnal at all, different than the affection uniting other siblings in the Seven Kingdoms... Many years later, in the riverlands, he burned his chest wanting to save two children from the wights. After he did it, his chest hair was burned, but his skin remained intact. You told us, Your Grace, that the fire cannot kill a dragon. But it should have at least burned a lion, it should have!

After, in Highgarden, the white dragon bore him away on his wings. And the dragons do not allow riders who do not share their blood. At least that is what my father believes. He was secretly learning the lore of the dragons during the reign of King Robert, when he was mourning the death of my mother and my siblings. The scrolls gave him comfort where people could not... Then he took a young wife, first one, then another, hoping to have more children. He abandoned his studies. Only two things remained, two treasures he brought home from the ruins of Summerhall, a blue oval stone hidden under a rounded shield among the scorched masonry. The shield of Ser Duncan the Tall, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard of Aegon V who must have laid down his shield in what he may have thought a vain attempt to protect the greatest treasure in Harrenhal at the moment when wildfire, not an ordinary fire, devoured him, his king and his king's heir. For this is not a stone, Your Grace as you well know. It's not a stone at all. It's a dragon egg, Your Grace, no more, no less, a token of survival of your blood and kin," Brienne paused to gain breath.

"Viserion, the white dragon singled Ser Jaime out of all people, to bring him the egg from my father's treasury. Is it not fair to say, Your Grace, when all this is acknowledged and measured, that Ser Jaime and his sister, Lady Cersei, could very well be your father's bastards, carrying a drop of dragon blood against their knowledge or will? Isn't that what made everything Ser Jaime did possible, both the good and the evil?"

"Lady Lannister," King Rhaegar said. "Thank you for your eloquence. I will never know for certain what my father did to Lady Joanna Lannister. But indeed, before I went to Trident, I suspected Ser Jaime and Lady Cersei to be my father's bastards. And of the things you cannot recall from the past, I would have you know that Lady Cersei fancied herself in love with me, of all nobles in the realm, when she was but a little girl, and I a grown lad betrothed to, and in love with Princes Elia."

"The dragons love twice," Lady Brienne said.

"That they do, most of them," King Rhaegar said. "And while this is good in our kind with tooth and claw, it rarely bears fruit among mortal men. It rather leads to tragedy and to despair... I will never know what Lady Joanna was to my father and if he was anything to her. For all I know, he could have been a godless rapist who forced her, or a rejected lover. Or something else entirely. All who may have known, have died."

"And you haven't quite finished your tale, my lady. Viserion has chosen his rider. He then came to your call, when you addressed him as a brother, acknowledging you as his human sister for being Ser Jaime's wife."

"There is another old saying, my lady, ancient but valid still. The dragon has three heads! And the dragon will need all three of them if we are to stand against the evil coming from the north..." the king turned pensive, and silent, staring at a torch burning with particular brightness on the wall above his head.

"Ser Jaime," the king turned his attention from wife to husband when he spoke again. "It is clear to me that your fate has led you to become a kinslayer, and not only a Kingslayer, for you have most likely murdered not only my father, but also your own... And that in itself is yet another proof of the drop of Targaryen blood coursing through your veins. Alas, kinslaying was not uncommon in the house of the dragons... Lastly, your sister seems to have recently turned to madness, a deadlier enemy of the Targaryens than any true conspiracy could be."

"With all this knowledge, I cannot sentence you to die, for my crime would be more grievous than yours. I would then be a kinslayer, a murderer of my brother, in full awareness of what I did. Let no one speak of what you have done with contempt ever again! For I know from Viserion's mind that my father's dying face has haunted you all your life. If that is not punishment enough, I do not know what is."

"Yet, you remain a Lannister as well. Lord Tywin always recognised you as his son and heir. And I would never deny the inheritance from your mother, or of any other noble lady of the realm. If I would, I would have to forgive my queen if she decided to challenge me to a duel. And I would deny the tradition of my own house where in the old days the queens were equally important as the king..."

"So I proclaim that it will be you, and your sister, if she ever wakes up to health again, who will continue to bear the title of the Wardens of the West. I see no one more suitable for the role."

"Rise, Ser Jaime," the king commanded to the man summoned, who bent a knee half way through the king's long speech.

"Before you leave, there is one punishment, however, that I have to inflict on you," the king smiled, and he never looked less like the Elder Brother since Sansa had met him. "For it concerns the indisputable honour of your lady wife. Let it not be said that you dishonoured her outside the vows of marriage. For I have married you when I thought I was a septon, and as it turned, I wasn't one. There is still a godswood in the Red Keep, I believe. Its heart tree is not a weirwood, but it will do as good for your cause as any septon would. Go there with your lady wife and renew your vows!"

"May that be your punishment, and may it last for a lifetime!"

Ser Jaime Lannister obeyed his king. He rose, light on his feet, and offered his arm to Lady Brienne, as a proper lord would, more handsome than ever in the light of the torches framing his golden locks.

Lady Brienne seemed torn about what to do, and at a loss of where to look. The blue egg she held was between them, a man, standing, and a woman, reclining again after she had dared to speak for him. Princess Daenerys scurried forward, faster than a little girl, eager to relieve the Lady Brienne of the precious burden.

When her hands were free to do what they wanted, Lady Brienne accepted Ser Jaime's hand. She stood up from the litter, watching her feet, careful not to step on a long trail of blue silk sweeping behind her, and Sansa finally understood the true source of her unease. She observed with wonder how the lady knight did not wear an armour for a change. Brienne donned an odd blue dress Daenerys' foreign maids must have contrived in great haste, where the Westerosi gown and the long sheet of silk named tokar Daenerys sometimes wore, married in a peculiar fashion. Sansa decided that the attire was most fitting. It did not enhance any womanly curves, but rather the natural elegance the tall people possessed. The softness of the fabric wrapped Brienne's body as a lover would, gentling her every move. _An exceptional gown for an exceptional lady,_ Sansa thought. Without thinking, she clapped her hands and cheered.

Her youthful motion was echoed by many pairs of hands. _Including Arya's,_ Sansa noticed with pleasure. Her sister needed some joy. They all did. _There is nothing wrong in rejoicing, there can't possibly be,_ she told herself. Yet as she did so, she still feared some unknown doom that was yet to come. She took a step closer to Sandor Clegane's shadow, as if it could protect her from life itself.

Cries of approval followed the Kingslayer when he took his bride to the Dragon Gate, proud as only a Lannister could be, for being allowed to cherish her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still three chapters to go, which means I'm getting one more than initially planned. This chapter got too long, so I broke it in two. I hope to publish Chapter 51 during the weekend after some editing effort. Huge thanks to everyone who commented and/or left a kudos. A huge thanks for reading as well.


	51. The Heart of the Mocking Bird

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where justice is served

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for gore take it seriously if that bothers you.

**Petyr**

_It is no wonder they called Daenerys beggar queen, and Viserys beggar king_ , Petyr Baelish thought with disdain. _When their older brother has become none the wiser after everything he had seen._ The sparing of Lord Greyjoy and Ser Jaime Lannister could only lead to the weakening of the King Rhaegar, blind enough to think that he could hold a court in the open and seek the love of the people. No ruler in his right mind should demand the love of the mob who would stone him on the first favourable occasion, as they did with Joffrey Baratheon. Even the seat he chose was inadequate and poor, not showing any luxury necessary to command the obedience and respect of his subjects. _Even poor Lord Stark had the sense to appear in rare expensive furs and velvet doublets in front of his equally bearlike bannermen,_ Petyr thought with amusement. _At least, the good people can admire Daenerys, she is more impressive in her foreign gowns…_

When his spies gave him tidings of being summoned to the king's presence, Lord Baelish took his time to be presentable and appear among the nobles in front of Dragon Gate in his best attire, walking with well trained elegance and ease. Lord Paramount of the Trident was no longer an upstart. He was a power on the rise not to be neglected. A force to be counted upon. Any king should see that. And his role in the unfortunate incident with sentencing Septa Lemore to death could be easily overlooked in favour of a much larger guilt of the High Septon. If Petyr was a bit disappointed that the king prevailed against the armies at the doors of the capital, he would not let it show.

The turmoil served him well.

Whatever the king desired in his limited mind, it was Petyr Baelish and not Rhaegar Targaryen, who was the undisputable master of the Mad King's wildfire. The thought reinforced the thin-lipped smile on Petyr's face.

"This brings us to the matter of the Wardenship of the South," King Rhaegar continued holding court when the cries following the departure of Ser Jaime Lannister have stopped. "Lord Mace has left us, alas, on the field of battle, and his eldest son and heir, Willas, is due to arrive tomorrow if the ravens do not lie. Lady Olenna Tyrell, come forth! What have you to say on the matter?"

The old lady came forward, somewhat bent from the loss of her son, _even if he had been a true oaf in war, and not particularly bright on any other count,_ Petyr thought with scorn, waiting patiently for his own grand appearance in the mockery of the court. _Pity that the reign of the good King Rhaegar may not last,_ he thought. _May the gods have mercy on his soul! When I am done with him and his spawn of lost Targaryens and worthless allies, he will not know where the blow came from._

Olenna's granddaughter, Lady Margaery, did not linger far away from her grandmother. The sweet young lady came as nude as their state of grieving for the _beloved_ father and son allowed, in a provoking lavish dress of thick red and black linen. The heaviness of the fabric was the only deference to the great loss she was supposed to have suffered with all her heart. Yet not big enough to make her cover her chest. _Ah, the natural loveliness of the colours of the House Targaryen!_ Petyr sighed, wiping a fake tear from his eyes, admiring the lack of charm and subtlety that was frequently present in Lady Margaery's actions. _Perhaps not the choicest dress to conquer a former monk,_ he thought. _Too obvious._

"We have heard several times in the past day how the Targaryens love twice, Your Grace," Lady Olenna spoke with prudence only age could give, bowing to the ground. _She's at least properly dressed for mourning_ , Baelish had to give her that. Her long hair covered her bony shoulders, greying her back almost until her waist, and she wore a proper veil of coarse black fabric over her head. Not a single golden rose adorned her simple dark brown gown, the warm brown instead of black being the only condescension to the colours of the House Tyrell.

"Let it not end as the day of sadness," the old woman truly tried her best to impress the king. _It is memorable_ , Petyr concluded.

"You have lost one wife in the past, Your Grace, and the House Tyrell would gladly offer another. My granddaughter, Margaery, is-"

"-innocent, and still a maid," the king interrupted, somewhat nervous. "And she will remain one until her death if it is up to me."

"Forgive me, Your Grace," the old lady tried to retrace her words, and take them back, too late in seeing her mistake.

Petyr was greatly pleased.

It seemed that soon there would be one contender less in the game of thrones.

"We did not mean offence," she said. "Or harm…" she stuttered.

"No?" the king asked flatly. "Where is Tommen then, your granddaughter's last husband?"

 _A valid question, my lady,_ Baelish thought, enjoying Olenna's trouble. He was never too happy when he had to work with the old hag in the small matter of King Joffrey and Lady Sansa. She was too clever by half, and therefore unreliable.

"I beg you a pardon, Your Grace, he was announced at the mummery, in a company of his mother, Lady Cersei Lannister," Lady Olenna said, "I do not know where he is now."

"Are you certain?" the king pushed the argument further. "Where is the boy who had more right to sit the Iron Throne than your granddaughter ever did, unknowingly having Targaryen blood in his veins? Tell me, where is he? Or wasn't it your deceased son, Lord Mace, may the Seven spare him the seven hells, who presented his mutilated body to my son, Aegon, to buy favours? He brought him a dead boy as Tywin Lannister brought the bodies of my children to Robert! Have you forgotten what you planned with Tommen, my lady? If he is alive, and well, it is not because of you… And pray, whose child did you kill if it was not Tommen, in the end?"

Lady Olenna bowed her proud head, and her granddaughter hid behind her, seemingly uneasy in her dress worthy of an expensive whore. _Now, now,_ Baelish thought, _the dragon has at least one head, and still some fire left. But it will not avail him for long…_

"And what of Joffrey Baratheon?" the king continued his tale, not losing composure any further.

 _A proper court upbringing, no doubt,_ Baelish thought, _a handsome harp-playing prince…_

The king ranted on, "From little I know he was mad as my father was, already at a young age, and unworthy to rule, no doubt. Yet he was murdered by treason and not removed by law, at his own wedding feast to the same granddaughter you are offering to me now? I am a kind fool, my lady, and I have been vain in my youth, but I am not a lackwit!"

"How long would I have to live if I was ever so dumb to marry Lady Margaery?"

"And how about letting others be accused of and put to trial for Joffrey's murder? Like Ser Jaime's dwarf brother, a true Lannister, who defended this city from Stannis Baratheon the best way he knew how, before your troops ever approached it with his father, Lord Tywin, and took all credit for victory?"

"And what of Lady Sansa, his wife only in name, my own niece, whom you delivered in hands of a lesser lord with no honour, to do with her as he pleased, once you failed to bind her in marriage to your house, for old Lord Tywin would not be played for your fool?"

The king's questions rang in the hollowness of the night air, and no answer was forthcoming.

 _It is not dear Rhaegar's upbringing,_ Petyr changed his mind. _It's too many songs, and taking part in the mummery. Gods be good, he is more idyllic in his accusations than Mance Rayder in his tales of love…A lesser lord, what a vile wording!_

The king brusquely finished his chain of thoughts. "You should have married my father, my lady, in your youth, as his second wife, not the late Lord Tyrell. You would have held your own among the most wicked of the dragons..."

 _Now there is a true praise, if I ever heard one,_ Baelish thought. _She should take pride in it._

Lady Olenna had the grace to keep quiet, and just like Baelish predicted from the weak, kind king, strong only in words, it was going to save her life.

"The gods are good," king's rage ebbed fully when he spoke again. "Your son who ordered Tommen's murder is dead, attempting to reach another moment of glory, no doubt, on the field of battle. Tommen is alive. And I have no proof for what you did with Joffrey, except the suspicions of my niece, Lady Sansa, against your noble word…"

 _Sansa, sweetling, so you told him,_ Petyr thought as only a man in love could. A prudent man in love. _Never mind, my dear, you will soon deny everything you dared to say…_

"…so I cannot in good heart sentence you to die…" _The king is so foreseeable_ , Petyr thought listening to how it would end for the Tyrells. "But since you are now in sincere mourning, and your granddaughter blameless like a lamb, I am counselling you to turn to the protection of the Faith. The silent sisters are eagerly awaiting you. You, Lady Olenna, for the rest of your life, and your granddaughter until the spring comes again. If I am wrong, and you are not grieving for your son, and do not wish to repent, than I will take away all the lands and the titles from your family, as is my right of a king. For you have given me no service so far, and I have defended your city from Lord Euron's forces the best I could in my condition. It is mine by the right of conquest to do with it what I will."

Lady Margaery looked ashen in her dress, as if all life had abandoned her features.

"Your Grace," Lady Olenna said, "I will withdraw and follow the wisdom of your counsel, as will Lady Margaery, until such time that you may see it in your heart to release us, in your generosity and goodness of the heart."

She drew a deep breath before continuing, as if she owned the king some further explanation. Petyr harboured only the highest scorn for the last remnants of honour the old woman still thought to possess, after everything she had undertaken in her too long life. _People should not live to get that old,_ he thought.

"I will admit that most of what you have said may hold water, Your Grace," Olenna said. "And I wish to believe that it doesn't surpass in evil what most other great houses in the realm would have done to help their own."

"Only one thing is not true, and neither I, nor my house will suffer to take the blame for it. No one could tell that delivering the innocent child the Lady Sansa was at the time, in hands of one of her mother's oldest _friends_ for protection, would not be an act of kindness."

"It seemed to me at the time as a better fate than the one that would have awaited her in the capital. In pursuing the goals of our house… we may have underestimated Lord Baelish's desire to rise beyond his own station."

 _Old witch,_ Petyr was upset, _just wait until I am freed of charges, and I will stuck one of the amethysts down your wrinkled throat._

The king was done with Olenna Tyrell who retired among the nobles with Lady Margaery. They both try hard to appear as invisible as the evil grey shadows which killed Lord Mace, if the big mouths of the smallfolk were to be believed on that count.

"Lord Walder Frey," Rhaegar said instead. "This great lord went even a bit further in what the noble Houses would and should do to protect their own. And I regret that he was successful in leaving the city when we rode to battle, rightfully fearing my wrath much more than the power of the warlocks."

 _Last one to arrive, and the first one to leave, all according to need,_ Petyr thought, thoroughly bored and unsurprised. _That old man has common sense, one has to admit. I don't suppose he will have many guests in that castle of his at the Crossing. What, he might say, so what? It means less mouths to feed with all the children and the bastards…_

"If he is ever found again…" Rhaegar drooled and Petyr was tempted to yawn "… he will die a traitor's death. For the slaughter he committed at the wedding of his daughter Roslyn has no equal before either gods or men. The wisdom of the people called it the Red Wedding, but it is black that they should have called it, and not a wedding. A black day of sorrow for all men who live by the virtue of any gods in all of the Seven Kingdoms…"

Petyr allowed himself to make a nod of approval in the king's direction, as was only proper and called for.

"…The High Septon abandoned the capital too. That is another reason I had to counsel Ser Jaime and his wife to say their vows in the godswood. The Faith has yet to convene to elect a new leader. May the Crone enlighten their minds to make a better choice and select a truer heart to carry her lamp in the times that are awaiting us all..."

"No, Your Grace," a soft voice said, and a graceful blond woman with an innocent face and eyes so dark blue that they looked black, opened her way through the crowd. Petyr didn't recognise her in a simple blue dress she wore. Two giant swords were hauled over her back. Frankly, Petyr didn't care who she was. His time had almost come.

"The House Martell has captured His Holiness," the lady continued. "As a gift for you, and the sign of our willingness to atone for the treason committed by my great-uncle, Prince Lewyn. If he did not believe Aerys, you might have won at the Trident, and both Princess Elia, and my father, Prince Oberyn, could still be among the living."

Two dark-skinned men dressed in brown leather dragged Petyr's last unfortunate ally behind the sand snake, and tossed him head in the mud in front of the King.

 _Serves you well for changing your mind about what had to be done,_ Petyr thought and waited for the inevitable. The level of treason the High Septon committed would likely warrant death even at the hands of the king too noble for his own good.

"I committed no crime," the old gnarled man stammered, dressed only in the roughspun tunic of the Faith, a bit worse for the wear and the treatment the hot-blooded Dornishmen must have given him after his capture, his feet bare and ugly as rotting roots.

"Then why were the dead bodies of your envoys found among the sellswords of the godless slavers?" King Rhaegar asked. "Mance Rayder rode with me for very long, and he has seen all kind of faces and robes from our Faith. He recognised the dead sparrows for what they were in the woods. You must have sent them there and promised to open the gates to the evil of their lords. You would have given your blessing to unknown demons from afar, to lay their claim to the Iron Throne! And you would not grant it to my sister or my son Aegon, questioning their origin! What does that say of you? What does that say of your Faith? How could you believe that a demon would do your will and let you gather riches for yourself, while proclaiming poverty and penitence for others!"

 _Ah, the treason of old friends hurts the most,_ Baelish thought, observing the king's righteous anger, unwillingly reminded of Cat and how she had betrayed him.

"I could forgive you for wanting to murder me," the king went on. "For I was unknowingly your rival for the highest office of the Faith. But I could never forgive you for sentencing my wife to death, in full comprehension that she was not a septa, and that you had no authority over her fate. And the laws of the realm are quite clear about your latest treason of this city and its people."

"Your Grace," the Martell bastard said. _Septa Tyene,_ Petyr remembered. Even if it had no importance for the fruition of his cause, knowledge could never hurt. Knowledge was power. "I happen to carry with me the ancestral sword of Her Grace's brother, late Lord Eddard Stark, one of the most honourable men in the Seven Kingdoms if only half of what we heard today is true, and it certainly seems so to us."

"We are of the south," Tyene said sweetly. "But it would please us greatly if justice for this abomination of nature could be served in the ways of the north. For the harm he wished Her Grace."

"He who passes the sentence, swings the sword," Lyanna Stark said, and Petyr observed the king with cold curiosity.

 _Let us see what you are made of, Your Grace,_ he thought. _Not all of us from the noble south can abide the wishes and customs of the northern barbarians and their lost siblings, the wildlings…_

To Petyr's slight astonishment, King Rhaegar did not flinch or gave a second look to his unrefined wife.

He stood up from his cheap seat, and took the sword he was offered. His Holiness writhed on the ground, begging for mercy, a pile of human misery. No one held him, there was no block, yet he was in such despair that he lacked the strength to crawl away from the arrival of his Justice. Sharp stench from his breeches filled the air when the king approached him.

"I, Rhaegar Targaryen, First of My Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm, sentence you to die," the king said, impassive.

The sword of the Starks swung, and found the neck it was searching for.

 _The damned blade went down too smoothly for a king who never was a master of the sword_ , Baelish considered, a sudden sting of fear creeping up his thin legs. The sensation did not last for long. Petyr knew very well he would be safe from such destiny.

The old head of His Holiness rolled on the ground towards a pond made by the rains. Not a moment passed before a stray blind dog mistook it for a toy, and carried it merrily away.

"Lord Petyr Baelish," King Rhaegar said in a trembling voice, sheathing the bloody sword to get it out of his sight.

 _You must be swallowing the bile and the desire to empty your dragon stomach in front of all, after the mummer's farce of calmness you just presented us with…_ Petyr was certain. He schooled his face in a pleasant expression, not willing to show the signs of his imminent victory too soon. He wanted to savour it while it lasted, every single moment of it.

"Come forth," the king said, controlling his manners better.

The mocking bird did not let the king wait, confident that every word exchanged would carry him one step further in his well deserved ambition.

"Your Grace," he said, bowing to the ground, careful to step around the High Septon's corpse. "I bow to your person and to your justice. May I inquire, what crimes do I stand accused of?"

"For one above all," Rhaegar said. "You betrayed my good-brother, Lord Eddard Stark, to his death. First by helping Lady Lysa Arryn to murder her husband Jon Arryn and blame the House Lannister. You wanted the war to erupt between the House Stark and the House Lannister for your own ends... And you wanted Lord Stark dead, to take his wife, as a spoils of that war."

"Lord Eddard Stark never betrayed anyone to whom he had given his word. He suffered for it greatly in his own family. His wife may have loved him, but she could never forgive him what he did, could never forget he brought home his alleged bastard from Robert's war. Yet he endured it all, and thus he found a way not to betray my wife, his sister, and the secret of our son, nor the king he swore an oath of fealty to, Robert Baratheon, his foster brother. If the Seven had not made him a family man, and if he kept the southern gods at all, he would have made a much better High Septon than the man I just executed."

Petyr found it hard to keep his face even, faced with the eulogy of the _honourable_ Ned Stark. _I have to be humble for only a while more…_

"Alas, your plan with Lady Catelyn did not work," the king continued. "Whether on purpose, or by chance, she was also brutally murdered at the Red Wedding you likely helped plotting, together with Lord Tywin Lannister, Lord Frey and Lord Bolton. After that, you gave Lord Tywin and Lord Bolton a false Arya Stark to supposedly control the North by marrying her to a Bolton bastard. The destiny of the girl you provided is too terrible for the ears of the ladies here, so I will not tell of it now, as it doesn't add or take from the greatness of your treasons."

"And you, you must have turned to second best, when you could not have Lady Catelyn. First you married her sister, Lysa, to inherit the Vale. Then you murdered Lysa, pushing her out of the Moon Door in Eyrie, her castle high above the clouds and the mountains. You blamed a singer for it, and you must have forced my niece Lady Sansa to confirm your words. Then you would have married Lady Sansa, the last of the Starks, to a highest bidder as if she was a breeding mare, not a lady, while at the same time you would be visiting her bed too, as her father, her captor, or her husband, if you could, why not? You deemed Aegon to be the best match for Sansa, because he was young, honest, and raised by a _septa…"_

"You sent your men to the Faceless Man to order a murder of my sister, Daenerys, as a side errand on their trip to the Iron Bank of Braavos, on one of the dromonds whose construction was ordered by the Queen Cersei... As a lady, Daenerys was of no use in your aims to control the throne through the helplessness of the Lady Sansa."

"When Aegon proved not to be such a malleable suitor for Lady Sansa as you thought, you poured the tears of Lys in his wine, not knowing what my wife, his septa, had been doing for years to protect him."

"Then, you bid your time. You blamed Aegon's septa for ruining your plans. When Aegon was gone to war, you faked his sentencing of my wife to death, on an empty parchment he signed. You gave it to the High Septon who hadn't questioned it, and instead used the authority he didn't have to judge a lady outside the remit of the Faith... It matters little that you both believed at the time that she was Lady Ashara Dayne."

"An interesting tale, Your Grace," Petyr said with greater calm than the king possessed since he started holding court, In a voice of a good father, sounding older, wiser and more trustworthy than Rhaegar, he pleaded. "I see that my enemies who would be your councillors have filled your ears with all sort of awful lies. They do not wish me to advise Your Grace in order to establish your reign for many happy years. And to Lady Sansa, I am ready to forgive her anything she may have said in her innocence, even to wed her if Your Grace would so allow, and if Your Grace was led to believe that my actions towards her may have harmed her honour in any way. She is so delicate by nature, and she believes in tales of glory; the ladies are known to invent such stories and songs... Your Grace is most wise and must be aware of such."

"Stories and songs, are they?" the king said with calm matching Petyr's word by word. He raised his hand to stop the Hound who was standing next to Lady Sansa again, to Petyr's wonder. _The mummery is over. Why is he there?_ "No, brother. It won't be necessary," the king rejected an unspoken offer. "The blood of this traitor is not yours to be spilled. First we shall hear out the Warden of the East."

Lord Baelish could not keep a chuckle in his throat. Everybody heard it against his will, and some men whistled in disapproval. He had to risk a more violent approach to correct his misstep.

"That demented boy who still sucked his mother's breast after his ninth name day?" he shouted to discredit Sweetrobin, having eyes only for the king he was going to destroy in moments. _Soon,_ he thought, _very soon, Your Grace._

Some voices laughed, but not enough of them. _Could it be that they believed the king?_

"I am _not_ a demented boy," Lord Robert Arryn said behind his stepfather's back, young but grown, steady on his feat, carrying a shield with the moon and the falcon with a misplaced pride of a rooster, in Baelish's opinion. "I am a falcon. I told you that many times but you wouldn't listen."

The young knight whistled carelessly, and a brown mountain hawk landed on his shield, accompanied in its flight by Lyanna Stark's white-headed eagle, who joined the queen on the makeshift throne.

The hawk chirped at Sweetrobin, and Petyr was truly afraid, for the first time in long years. _The brown bird was there when I faked Septa Lemore's sentence…_

"I am a falcon," the boy repeated. "And I was flying under the Moon Door when you pushed my mother, Lady Lysa Arryn, through it. I have seen it clear as a day. It was you, and not the singer you blamed. You lied to her that you loved her. I heard everything you said about her, and how she killed my father. She killed for you, and she died by your hand."

"I am a falcon," the boy wouldn't cease to repeat, it seemed. "I have never been ill, or demented. I just didn't know what I was because in the Vale of Arryn we have no tales of wargs. I was ill because I could not master my gift. I was afraid when you killed my mother, and I spent too much time as a hawk, not sleeping, eating or drinking. I nearly died from exhaustion and you were helping me to die better. When I was a hawk, I saw Maester Colemon putting sweetsleep in my milk to make me go faster, on your orders. I was more afraid, and I stayed with my hawk even longer, aggravating my condition. I didn't drink sweetsleep, yet I was growing weaker day by day, and my seizures increased. Until the gods were good, and the winter chased us down from the Eerie. My beautiful cousin, Lady Sansa, led me down from the mountain at the peril of her own life. And down, in the Gates of the Moon, and later, on the Quiet Isle I became less afraid. I had more courage. I flew less, and I ate and slept some. I ate food you didn't serve me. My seizures diminished and I learned how to breathe again."

"Then, we came to the capital. I served King Aegon and I met a noble septa who had raised him. She taught me what I was and what I should do to use my ability. When I could accept the truth, she showed me where her knowledge came from, when her eagle came to her from the north, nearly dead from flying. We shared a gift and we flew together in the Red Keep, an eagle and a falcon. I saw you falsify Aegon's letter. You didn't only attach the empty scroll with his signature to the parchment where he poured his soul and his heart's doubts about Septa Lemore. You have written in the words that were never there, in imitation of his handwriting, copied from his diary."

Lord Baelish was silent. And then, he played his last card, laughing like a madman would. _It is time,_ he thought. _I will become the Protector of the Realm, and none of you fools will stop me. It is too late for you to stop me._

"It burdens me to admit all this, Your Grace," Petyr Baelish said, "but you shall have to bend to _my_ will, or this city shall burn and you shall have only your lord father to blame… He so kindly provided the means for such… eventuality. My faithful servants are ready to set alight all the wildfire Aerys stored under the Red Keep on my command. You will understand that my conditions are modest. All I want is a safe passage from the city for me, and my men, and the Lady Sansa to take with me for wife."

The king wore a pained dull expression on his face. Of an honest man caught by surprise. _Good,_ Petyr Baelish had never been happier.

"And if I do agree," Rhaegar said, showing at least some cleverness. After all, he had grown uin the Red Keep, and not in the deserts of the North like poor Ned Stark. "If I do agree to your terms, your men will burn us all anyway. My sister and I and a few others may be able to fly out riding dragons, but the city will perish nonetheless. And if I send my dragons to attack your men, I will start the fire myself."

"Wildfire is a fickle substance, Your Grace," Petyr prudently informed. "I repeat, it was your father who placed it there, not me. The blame for the doom of King's Landing lays solely on the House Targaryen. It's funny, if I may say, how you spared Ser Jaime Lannister for you could not be a kinslayer, yet you said you would have condemned your own father to death for wanting to burn the city, if you returned from the Trident. You are no better than I am."

"I never claimed to be better than anyone," Rhaegar said. "Only to uphold the laws the best I could."

"What shall it be, Your Grace, your best, when it comes to my terms? Shall I give a sign?" Petyr asked.

"So you admit to having sent your men to secure the storage of wildfire for you, while we were busy defending the city from the outside enemy?" the king asked in return, stark pale and defeated.

"It was only fair, Your Grace," Petyr said, fairly satisfied, enjoying the look of terror on the face of the Lady Sansa who approached him from the side.

"I will go with him, Your Grace," she told her pitiful king. "If he gives up the wildfire first, and if he proves that he did it. I am not worthy of the lives in this city." Ned Stark sister's eyes flashed with short lasting pride, before mirroring her husband's expression of yielding to a stronger opponent as a dutiful wife should.

Petyr could not help himself imagining Sansa, her hair loose, her blue eyes supplicating, her lithe body shaking with fear and pleasure under his body, when he would take her as he had always deserved. _Cat,_ he whispered in his mind, with utmost longing.

"In seven hells you will," the Hound growled, ruining an image of obedient, pliable Sansa in Petyr's mind, breaking his sense of accomplishment in tiny bleeding pieces. The ugly man pulled Petyr's just reward back where she came from and forced her to face him. Gently, he tipped her chin upward, and kissed her with more intensity than he ever did in the bloody mummery, with no mask between her immaculate pale face and the solid mass of his twisted scars.

And Sansa welcomed his lips, tasting them with her own as she would a blood orange from Dorne, standing on her toes, forgetting her words, her promises to the king, forgetting where she was, never denying the dog the honesty and the warmth of her affection, as she had always denied Petyr, her father, her saviour, her best friend… She merely tolerated his advances with that cursed, detached bearing of the North.

Petyr lifted the arm he still had left.

It was time to give the sign to his faithful Kettleblacks. One of them was already on the battlements, waiting for it. Petyr had seen clearly the sign of the black kettle on his armoured chest, lit by moonlight. _They will all burn,_ he thought with hatred.

He lifted his only arm and looked towards the Red Keep.

He looked and he waited.

The night breeze touched his face, clear of fumes. There was no single jet of fire, no stench, no smell, no scent, no smoke, no filth or danger in the clean air above the city. The walls slept in peace, and many people glared at the Lord Paramount of the Trident with the same disdain he had for them.

The moon watched them all, inhuman and distant.

Petyr Baelish closed his eyes. _It can't be true,_ he thought. _They are just waiting. Or they didn't see the sign._

He lifted his arm again, higher up.

When he reopened his eyes, the Kettleblack on the city walls removed his helm. Revealing the black hair and the bright blue eyes of Robert Baratheon's bastard. The stag started laughing at the mocking bird together with the treacherous moon, waving a torch in a signal of his own making, to someone below, next to the gates within the city.

Petyr Baelish turned back to face King Rhaegar Targaryen.

The king looked as if he had just let his own mask fall after a very successful mummery.

His thin body loomed tall as the white trees worshipped in the north, his eyes glowed red on his pale face. Any semblance of weakness was gone from his head and face. Lyanna Stark stood next to him, a true barbarian queen, more merciless in her demeanour than Ned Stark ever was. Ruthless and unforgiving, she stared at Petyr. Her eagle croaked savagely.

 _The north… remembers,_ Petyr thought, wondering where that came from.

"You have heard him confess his treason, people of King's Landing!" King Rhaegar announced. "And now, you can rejoice if you so will, for your king has been many things, but not a complete fool!"

The Dragon Gate opened wide. A fiddler started a festive song to celebrate the moment. Robert's bastard from the walls, the old griffin and some of his men dragged out three charred unrecognisable bodies, followed by a very much alive ugly red-haired knight, incessantly chattering about his role in the great deeds of the day. Last came Lord Varys in his female slippers and robes, poised and slightly derisive as was his wont.

"Splendid, my lord Gendry! A work of a master smith, no doubt," Varys congratulated Robert's bastard pointing at his chest. What looked like ears of a black kettle high up on the walls, became branching antlers of a black stag when down on the ground.

"Would these _brave_ men be yours?" the king asked Petyr with a glint of amusement in his glowing eyes.

"They are called the Kettleblacks, I hear," Rhaegar said about the corpses. "A small house from the Crownlands sworn to serve you, Lord Baelish, as far as I understand. Their father will grieve for the passing of his sons… They never came close to the wildfire. They did try, nevertheless. You can commend them for their loyalty."

"It is only that the pyromancers you killed and the alchemists you bribed did not know all the truth. My father was unmatched in keeping his secrets. Only those with dragon blood could climb the stairs to the storage of wildfire without getting burned to death. The pyromancers your men killed all had a drop of dragon blood, mostly from the Blackfyre side, without knowing it themselves. They could not tell you what they didn't know, not if they wanted, not even under the torture. They retrieved the jars for Tyrion Lannister when he needed them. My father would pick them as infants and give them lessons to serve him in his experiments."

"Your hedge knight, Ser Shadrich, on the other hand, was not so happy in your service. He immediately betrayed you to young Lord Arryn who for his part informed Lord Connington. That is how we found their bodies much sooner than we otherwise would have. And we sealed all other passages to my father's evil weapon you didn't even know existed. It was the first order I have given when I discovered who I was, just before the mummery was over. Two of my oldest friends, Lord Varys and Lord Connington took care of it while you were still deceived by your dreams of glory..."

The king paused, but not for long.

Impassive, somber, he stated. "Petyr Baelish, by all the laws, of the gods and of men, you deserve to die. Yet I will not swing the sword of the man you betrayed."

Petyr's heart beat faster in his chest and he said sincerely, for the first time in more than twenty years. "You are too kind, Your Grace, let me-"

"-In that you are wrong, my lord," the king's melodious voice turned into pure undiluted iron. He spoke in a way Aerys II would have been afraid of if he still lived. "I am not kind at all."

Petyr waited, troubled. _This can go either way,_ he thought, frantically searching for the way out of his predicament.

"I will merely let another, the one whom you hurt, and ruined, beyond human measure, to carry out the justice in your regard," Rhaegar whispered.

Petyr looked around, not understanding. "But, Your Grace-" he tried to say something, and then he felt it. An unnatural coldness was approaching, and the words have frozen in his throat. The woman was hooded as he had seen her on the weirwood throne in the riverlands.

She walked towards Petyr, lowered her hood and smiled.

The gurgle was the most horrible thing he had ever heard, and the dread worse than when they cut off his arm, more terrible than being hanged or put to the sword...

"No, Your Grace, please, no! I will confess everything! I will do anything you want! Please!" the words came to him, but it was to no avail.

" _Petyr"_ the gurgle may have called him, and he wished he would faint before he would die, but the gods would not grant him his last wish.

Catelyn's dead red hair filled his vision. The scars on her cheeks, the gash on her throat. The dead blue of her once trusting eyes.

 _Petyr,_ she called to him again, and he could hear her clearly. He covered his ears but he still heard her. It could not be! He was _smart!_ He would prevail. There was always a way out.

Except when there was not.

"A bird who secretly clawed others to their death for years, to soothe the wounds of its heart. Until, somewhere on the way, its heart was lost. Dreams change, like life, unlike death. No one can be certain of what tomorrow will bring," he heard the serious voice of Mance Rayder. "Those were the words of the Ghost of the High Heart to his lordship."

 _And no one is smart enough,_ Petyr remembered the end of the prophecy, when the ice cold hands, and fang-like sharp nails pierced the sigil of the mocking bird on his costly rich tunic. Ice penetrated his skin and it hurt worse than anything in his living life. Breath hitched in his throat. The cold hand withdrew, and showed something to Petyr in front of his dying eyes, about to jump out of his skull from excruciating pain.

On a palm of her dead hand.

His living heart, torn from his dying chest, soaked in his life blood.

Still beating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was it awful enough?


	52. The Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where a life is given back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some gore and undead characters if that bothers you.  
> For the rest it's as fluffy as the pinkolifant can make it. It's almost the end of the story after all.

**Jaime**

Jaime tugged at the impossibly long sheet of rich blue silk Brienne was made to wear. Accomplished, he sighed with satisfaction.

It made her spin like a Lyseni dancer, in irregular circles, until she looked away from him and through the high window, looming above the outer walls of the White Sword Tower in the Red Keep. She tried to catch a breath, dishevelled after a long day and the unwanted rushing flight on the back of a dragon. The sky was polished darkness, calm and cold, not betraying the excitement and the fear in the hours barely passed.

 _Your mane has grown too,_ he thought with love, but he could not tell her that. _White and gold like the fields of wheat in the West when the summer approaches its end.._. _Glittering like the scales of the young white dragon…_ He would tell her that, one day, if he lived to see his old days. He would tell her when she would be his wife long enough to believe him. He would tell her then how much he had always adored the tickling of her hair on his bare skin, so different than the boring soft curls he owned. _So lovely._

They were lodged on the tower's topmost floor, where the chambers of the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard still gaped spacious and empty, as pristine as when Jaime had left them, in the times that now seemed so remote when Tommen was still king.

The Red Keep was buzzing with voices and movement of people when they returned from the solitude of the godswood, uncertain where to go next. What were they to do, when Jaime had been given his life back? What was there to do at all after any victory?

"The king prevailed," the servants whispered. "He has the just heart of the Father and the strength of the Warrior… He vanquished the traitors and the foresworn…" Words went running from mouth to mouth, and the king's deeds appeared larger with every man or woman who dared to open them. Jaime would rather think that the king had dragons, above all, while trying hard to forget _he_ had a dragon as well. In kind.

It was almost fair to say that Viserion had Jaime, rather than the other way around.

They tried to leave the Red Keep, but a very insistent servant urged them back, in the direction of the White Sword Tower. The annoying brown-bearded man carried a long scroll, where hastily given indications of who was to stay where were given, in a tight script Jaime did not know. And did not care to learn about.

"Come," Brienne said. "I do not particularly care where I will fall asleep tonight. It's been a long and a dreary journey from home."

"You went all the way to Tarth?" he asked and she nodded. "In less than a day, there and back," she said, "I'd never believe it possible if I didn't see it with my own eyes." He readily agreed with the sentiment his wife was showing, remembering his own forced stay on Viserion's back. They were ushered to the White Tower by a chattering bunch of maids and boys running errands before Jaime could protest.

And they were left alone after one too many bows, and hushed m'lords and m'ladies.

So there he was again, about to add another feat to a long list of noble deeds he took part in, always at his best in dishonouring places and sacred customs. The chambers of the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard were just the right place for Ser Jaime Lannister to bed his wife. After swearing a vow never to take one when he was no more than a boy.

As if she could read his thoughts, Brienne said, perched on the window, gaze roaming in the sky. "Everything has changed. What was before, does not count any more."

Having said that, she twirled back of her own accord, so that the fabric gave way. One of the edges of the scarf she was wrapped in, to appear she was wearing a gown, ended as a strange bandage around Jaime's stump and right hand shoulder, linking Brienne and him together at an uncommon angle, chest gently touching chest. A soft blue armour encircling the two bodies painted a visible image of a bond running much deeper, the one that had been between them for a very long while. _Since we fought near Maidenpool or since the Bloody Mummers?_ he wondered, with uncharacteristic melancholy. _Where would I be without you?_ He suspected he'd make a handsome corpse somewhere in a ditch, alongside a road ruined by rains and broken men.

"How long did you know? About your origin, I mean?" she blurted against his mouth, her voice quavering only an inch higher from his upper lip. "How long have you harboured doubts? And when were you going to tell me?"

"Gods," he said, indisposed for any kind of confrontation, or a joust of speech. The fire had gone out from him with the judgement he faced and the only thing he desired was to oversleep the winter.

Brienne pulled the scarf in rising fury, and he slammed into the full length of her body, half undressed as she was.

"Gods," he repeated, but his voice was darker. The small flames rekindled somewhere in his guts, or lower.

Yet he had a strange feeling she would not let them continue before he answered her question.

So he tried.

"The truth? Brienne, I did not know! I did not know until _you_ told it. How long have I had my doubts? For a very long time, ever since I killed Aerys. But I thought myself a fool who wanted to make his own crimes look less, at least in his own head. So I never gave much faith to my suspicions, nor to the old rumours of the courtiers about my mother. Yes, I have heard them! They named my mother the whore from the Westerlands... And those who favoured Aerys, imagine, they existed too... Those who loved the old mad Targaryen dearly, or lived of his favours, claimed that she had hurt their beloved king… Would you believe any of it, if you heard it told about your own late mother? She died giving birth to Tyrion, and I adored her as a boy! She was proud, but gentle, not like my father... Lord Tywin Lannister, may he enjoy the seven hells in peace! Gods, Brienne, I still don't know the entire truth!"

"I guess not," she yielded, and he loved her all the more. "Would anyone know?" she inquired with stealth.

"I don't know," he said. "Aunt Genna, maybe. That ghost-woman in the Riverlands who healed the Elder Brother… who healed the king…"

Viserion, never far away, released an image of a frail old woman in Jaime's mind faster than any raven could bring the news. "The ghost of the High Heart," Jaime told his wife, remembering.

"We could, we could…" she stammered, and he saw how it was not easy for her to come up with the proposal. "We could fly there tomorrow…"

 _Fly,_ Viserion giggled in the night air above the Red Keep, delighted as a child. _Good. Fly!_

"I thought you hated riding on the dragon's back," Jaime said. "I am not yet quite accustomed to it myself."

"I do," she admitted her weakness openly. "Hate it, I mean. How did you know? I thought I was going to die when we went to Tarth and back. I barely had time to talk to my father about the egg Viserion had been hoarding since he put you down. And then the king must have blown the horn of dragonlords, and I was snatched and flown back to King's Landing, in a speed many times bigger than the ordinary beating of the dragon wings … It must be something the horn does, it increases the swiftness and the strength of the beasts…"

They were completely entangled in silk, body and thought, when Jaime had enough of all the talking, and finally kissed Brienne as a man should kiss his wife, wishing Viserion to fly away and _stop_ spying on them. _I will not look at you if you ever bed a lady dragon, I promise,_ he thought and imagined he had heard a cackling of the fire in his brains, unsure if it was Viserion's fire or his own, as the heap of growing white scales decided to leave them alone and to fly away, to hunt or to scout the dark skies with his scaled brothers.

And Brienne was more of a woman than she must have thought, trained in womanly arts from a tender age. For when she dived into their kiss, she somehow undid the ungodly blue attire that trapped them together, with the same ease she could cut a man in two on the battlefield. The garment sank down, utterly defeated, pooling around their entangled feet. Their hearth had been lit, by the equal part prudent and pestering servants, and for that, Jaime was grateful.

He could see her clearly. As naked as when she stood up in anger in the baths of Harrenhal. He took a short step back to admire his wife in a spilling pond of silk. Happier than a fool, he concluded she looked more lovely every time she would let him near her body. A gift he was still not certain he deserved, but he took it all the same.

"Jaime", she said softly, and placed his hand on a small breast she liberated, shivering in anticipation. Then, the fire burned high, and it was all he needed.

The lion and the dragon converged, not shy at all in matters of the senses. Setting all thought of honour aside, Jaime found that for such profound matters the White Sword Tower was as good place as any.

The Kingsguard Jaime was sworn to, was no more.

And surely no harm could come to anyone's honour from just a little bit of love.

**Sansa**

"Mother!" Arya screamed at Lady Stoneheart like a wild animal. Both Sansa and Sandor had to hold her back, frightened of what she intended to do. The unity of their endeavour terribly confused Sansa. _We are so different, at most times,_ she found a time to think. _Yet we both know Arya._

Arya jerked, fighting against her sister and the Hound, trying to get away with all her might, until she ended up retching on the ground between them, unable to look at the creature holding Petyr's heart.

The creature who was their mother must have understood she had been looking at her daughters. Or her daughters at her, it made no matter.

 _And then she wept,_ Sansa thought, except that the tears could not run down the face of a lady who had lost her soul. Lady Stoneheart released the heart she had been holding and came one step closer to her daughters, blood still dripping from her claw-like hands.

 _I'm sorry,_ she may have said or, _I love you,_ or something else entirely.

Sansa profoundly regretted she could understand her own mother less than Sandor's horse. Yet she could not deny that for the first time since she was faced with her mother's fate in the riverlands her heart was moved towards the creature in front of her. Lady Catelyn Stark did not deserve to become what she did, just like so many truly good men did not deserve to die.

And seeing first hand what Petyr was like, Sansa could not disapprove of her mother's course of action. She thought, oddly,  _It's something Sandor could have done too, without hesitation..._

"Mother," Sansa managed a simple courtesy and a small smile. "Arya was ill… She is not appalled by you. She just needs to rest. We all do."

It was true, in part, for Sansa's own exhaustion lingered in her body, after resisting the warlocks and standing in court. Even suspecting Sandor would catch her, and wondering what it would feel like to faint in his arms, Lady Sansa Stark did not wish to fall.

Lady Stoneheart may have nodded, or not, but she wouldn't move. She just kept staring at Sansa as if she had seen her for the first time in her life.

Uncalled, Aunt Lyanna walked over and helped. "Catelyn," she said to her good-sister. "Let us go back to the city now. You will see your daughters tomorrow if you so wish."

To Sansa's relief, and shame for feeling that way about her mother, the creature put the hood back on and let herself be led to the city gates, by a small queen way shorter than Lady Catelyn, undeterred by her terrible condition.

Arya looked after them only when they were far gone. "Who is that? The queen, who is she?" she asked as if she had followed the doings of the court with deaf ears. Or as if she just didn't dare believe what she had heard.

"Aunt Lyanna," Sansa said.

Arya retched again, only yellowish water, until her tummy must have been well emptied from anything it may have still contained, and it was not that much.

"Come, girl," the Hound said then, to Arya, or to Sansa, or to both. Later on, Sansa could barely remember being pulled on his horse with her sister, or how the Stranger took both of them to the Red Keep, or how the king bowed above her with a slightly worried look, or how the dragons scorched the ground were Petyr and the High Septon used to stand to make it clean... _There would be no new corpses left to wake up half living on the morrow,_ she thought. _Only my mother and Lady Jeyne… And… the army outside the walls…_

Sansa woke in the middle of the night.

Her head hurt but the rest of her body was fine. _Better than I have been in a very long while,_ she thought. Arya was curled up in the same bed next to her, and the chamber they were in was never Sansa's. It smelled on dust and the lack of use, but the bed linen was clean, and the colours clear. Green and yellow. Not belonging to any of the great houses. By the looks of it she suspected she was somewhere in the Maegor's Holdfast, but she had no idea where. She stood up and opened the door.

Sandor was not there.

She understood that he could not very well share the bed with her and her sister, but she still hoped he would be somewhere, lurking near by, never far away from Sansa, the silly little bird. She almost expected he would sleep at her doorstep like a loyal dog, and cursed herself for a stupid spoiled girl for imagining such a thing.

Still, his absence was hurting.

When she looked back, Arya was still asleep.

 _It will not hurt to look around,_ Sansa thought. _Maybe the Hound is somewhere here._

Going down the corridor, she discovered where she was and she did not like it at all. From the chambers where she woke up, a large passage opened on the right side, leading to the king's private quarters. Sansa shivered. And remembered who the king was. _My uncle._ So maybe she could come uncalled in the middle of the night and ask where Sandor went.

There was no Kingsguard standing in front and the still distant door was left slightly ajar. A presence could be felt before it could be seen, black and dreadful. Soon, Sansa understood Drogon was asleep in the corridor, covering most of the ground between the king's chambers and another set of rooms that used to be the queen's, but Sansa suspected they could belong to Daenerys in the new order of things. _He needs no Kingsguard with the protection like this…_ she thought. The dragon must have sensed her approach but he didn't move a scale in his sleep… or rest… whatever the dragons did. His body barely fit in the precinct and it stretched in all directions between the chambers he guarded, bendable like an oddly shaped boneless animal made of thatch and fabric.

Careful not to step on the dragon, Sansa came to the king's chambers' door and pushed it open with fear she could not explain. And nearly ran away and closed it behind her when she saw them as they were.

King Rhaegar stood at the window, touching the snout of the green dragon through the open glass. He wore a tunic of soft black velvet, loosely open at the chest, carelessly showing a scar almost as horrible as the one Sandor had to wear on his face. Aunt Lyanna donned a thin blue nightgown, revealing her form. She was standing on a chair behind her husband's back. In tender, practised movements, she was braiding his hair, as if it had been something she had done many times before, enjoying the meticulous work. Her own black and grey waves hanged wild and tangled all over her face, like Nymeria's fur after strong rain, or the feathers of an eagle caught in storm.

Yellow and orange flames burned high in the double hearth of the king's chamber, and the glass candle stood on top of a circular table, shedding its purple glow.

"I have to let him fly north again," Rhaegar said to his wife, caressing the dragon.

"I know," she said, pensive. "You will do what you must."

The couple was barefoot, his feet gnarled from the life of a monk, hers perfect and pale in the scarce light. His harp was resting near the bed where some garments were hastily left, both of the woman, and of the man. The black cover over a large bed was still untouched. _Small mercies,_ Sansa sighed.

Her aunt heard her, and spoke, louder. "It would seem we have a late guest."

"I am sorry," Sansa stuttered. "It is… I was only…"

"It's quite all right," aunt Lyanna said.

"No one can sleep," King Rhaegar added. "And I would wish to say something to you first thing in the morning so I can do it now, if you would hear me out, my lady."

"Your Grace," Sansa made a small courtesy, unsure how to address properly her royal uncle.

"I understand that my sister had heard many suitors for your hand. Some of them have run away, and some of them are no more… And she bid you listen to the suit of one of them, of her choosing," the king spoke with care, observing how Sansa's stance stiffened. "It so happens that there is only one man in Westeros whom Daenerys and I both find worthy of your hand by birth, and by deed, if, of course, you would give your consent to this match. Of your own free will."

"Who is it, Your Grace?" Sansa asked, hoping, hoping, hoping. _King Rhaegar called Sandor brother, surely he must think of him as worthy,_ she prayed.

"Alas, your suitor is shy, despite being of age," the king said in a voice of the Elder Brother. "He made me promise I would not tell you. He bids you hear him out on the morrow if you please. Not too early I think, for he has gone on an errand and he should be back only after midday meal. My sister for her part bids me tell you this man is the only one she considered for your suitor before she ever learned I was in life. Daenerys feels you may believe my word on this, but not hers."

Sansa blushed for the king was right. The proposal of Lord Walder Frey and Daenerys' almost _inclination_ to it, faked or not, was still too fresh in her memories. "Can I reject this suitor?" she asked.

"Yes," the king reassured her in a deep voice of the dragon. "I give you my word. And I will say no more on the matter."

"Thank you, Your Grace," Sansa said mechanically and moved to embrace her aunt before taking her leave. "My mother?" she asked.

"Catelyn is housed in a set of rooms corresponding to her stature, with Thoros of Myr and the singer called Tom Sevenstrings, who is already writing a rhyme about the end of Lord Baelish, I hear," aunt Lyanna said. "We should ask Mance and him to compete before the journey."

"Which journey?" Sansa asked.

"You must know," aunt Lyanna said.

"We are going north, aren't we?" Sansa whispered.

"There is no other way," Rhaegar murmured in return.

And Sansa believed that the word of the royal couple may hold true, and that she would be allowed to reject the unknown suitor if he were not the only man she wanted.

Despite that, she stood a moment too long at the door of the royal chambers before closing them. And heard.

"How will our new Warden of the South fare with my niece, what say you?" the king asked his wife in a peaceful yet puzzled tone Sansa's Father would use when he sought Mother's opinion.

"It was his choice to come unannounced," Lyanna judged. "And he will have to accept the outcome. I sense that he fears Sansa's decision might not be her own if she would know beforehand. And my niece can be stubborn. We will see on the morrow. If she rejects him only for the secrecy, she can still change her mind."

 _Warden of the South?_ Sansa was disappointed. Willas Tyrell looked kind but he was not the man she would marry. He was supposed to arrive to King's Landing on the next day to take his father's ashes back to Highgarden. _And you are silly for thinking that the Hound would ask for the king's permission to marry you. He never swears any vows. When will you learn? He didn't even wait for you to wake up, for all you know he might have gone to the winesink…_

 _At least I can say no, this time,_ she thought.

Sansa returned to her chambers and sat upright in her bed, watching Arya sleep. And no matter how exhausted she was, she could not close her eyes.

**Lyanna**

"I feared you in the past," Rhaegar said to Lyanna with a sigh.

"I know," she grinned, cherishing his confession. "And I feared for myself whenever we met before Harrenhal, by chance, or by fate…" Pushing the insistent tears back into the charcoal depth of her eyes, she only let out her joy. "And I never thought I would see you in your father's fineries…"

Pulling her husband's tunic further open was a miracle in itself, touching the harshness of the scar on his chest with care and adoration.

"Does it still hurt?" she had to ask.

"Sometimes," he said. "Not now. I am sorry about my attire, but there was little choice between monk clothing and the similar trifles belonging to the Lannisters or even the Baratheons…"

"Those were not fit for a dragon," she mocked him, mercilessly.

"Or a wolf," he mocked her back. "I didn't carry a chest of gowns and disguises twice across the sea! How could the griffin allow you such a luxury?"

"I have my ways," she said. "And the tunic befits you," she concluded, ignoring his remarks, and tied a silver ribbon around the braid she finished after her niece was gone. Lyanna Stark stared at the eyes of the green dragon, still watching them through the window. "Did you find Jon?" she asked.

"He did, or he came close to finding him if I read the images with justice," Rhaegar answered for the beast. "But he is far behind the Wall, and in need of help. Rhaegal has to return."

"May I?" Lyanna asked, pointing at the scaly snout. The dragon snorted. The queen took it as a sign to touch the foremost scale she could reach. Eyes deep and grey like the sword called Ice, she told Rhaegal: "When you find my son, if you can talk to him as you can talk to his father, tell him..."

Her voice broke then over the vastness of twenty empty years, and all her strength faltered from motherly regret.

Rhaegar embraced the animal again, and when Lyanna's eyes cleared from tears, her husband and the beast looked at her with equal troublesome tenaciousness.

"Go," she said. "Go and tell him, please."

"Tell Jon that his Mother loves him," she wailed and backed from her husband and his beast, too weak to stand.

She sat on the bed Robert Baratheon must have slept on not so long ago, and fought the urge to shiver. Walking barefoot on the floor rushes was a good idea when Rhaegar played harp for her, in memory of Arthur and of Ashara, and all the good people who helped them, and who were no more.

It was not so tempting any longer. She reclined on bed, unable to see the green dragon off, hiding her feet under the bed cover. It was not like with her eagle, she could not trust Rhaegal, not fully. A hum of wings could be heard over the palace, when Lyanna dared to open her eyes.

"You know," Rhaegar said from the window. "When I flew with Drogon to save you, he admired me and praised me for never loving or marrying a sister, in blood. When I tried to ask why, he explained that while in the race of dragons loving your sister is... well... the usual... loving outside your blood line is a sign of utmost bravery... The scrolls of old never taught us that... And so many other things... The dragon lore remains largely forgotten, and the dragons cannot teach us all they know. Their mind is different than mine, blood of the dragon or not."

"Than I am even more glad for Ser Jaime. It would seem he mastered the same kind of courage, albeit later in life," Lyanna Stark spoke, half absent in her grief for the child given away, and a young man lost behind the Wall.

Rhaegar walked over and sat next to her, keeping some distance between them.

"Lyanna, please," Rhaegar begged her then. "What is it you did not want to tell me? Why is it that you would not ride out with me? The wife I remember always competed with men in audacity."

"I didn't dream that Drogon and you brought me to the cave above the Vale, did I?" she spoke as she intertwined her tiny hands among his long-fingered ones, observing the difference in size with lovable curiosity, coming back to life of hope from his warmth. "When I woke up and saw Daenerys, I thought she saved me. And I thought the truth to be the fruit of my womanly imagination. You offended me, and I was going to leave you but you would not have it... Be as it may, now I know that it was not a dream."

"It wasn't," Rhaegar whispered. "I was desperate to remain myself and to stay with you..."

"I know," she said, simply.

"How?"

"If it were a dream, I would have gotten my moon blood," she said, "wouldn't I?"

Rhaegar was stunned before he uttered: "You are several years younger than me, my lady, but I, I should be too old..."

"Then it is the child of the gods," Lyanna says, "for I desired no other man since you were gone. At least that part of being a septa was easy enough for me. The obedience came more difficult."

"But we both know it is yours."

"Jon's brother, or sister."

Rhaegar wordlessly buried his silver head in her belly, flat and taut as when she was a young woman, where nothing would be visible for the first weeks to come. _A tender tummy, and that will be all,_ she remembered.

"Little dragon," he said. "Little wolf," he smiled not showing his face.

"But you will ride north with me?" he asked then, giving her a purple glare from below, and she could see tremendous fear painted on his pale aged face.

"Of course I will, silly," it was easy to dissuade him. "What would I do in the barbaric south all by myself? I have seen enough of Dorne, Reach, and now of the capital to last for a lifetime. Staying here is beside the point. If you fail, there will be nowhere where I can go, and if the worst comes to pass, I'd rather be with you than on my own... I may stay behind the battle lines for the safety of our unborn child, but never too far from you. I could not bear not knowing, waiting for ravens..." Lyanna's voice crumbled down again, from the bleakness of the future.

"I would love you now," Rhaegar said. "And I would forget for a night what still has to come. Would you let me? Would you be patient with me? It's just that, in my other life, I may have forgotten how."

The last confession cost him, she could tell, as a kind monk gave way to a proud, wounded man. Lyanna thought how it certainly did not look as if he had forgotten anything when they joined hastily in the cave above the Vale. She chose not to say it, for his sake.

Instead, she pulled the black tunic down the bony shoulders of her dragon husband, and made small circles with her too small fingers over the upper part of his body and his scars, slowly tuning to the distinct uprising of the instinct in her own belly

"I still remember," she said, "let me help."

"Please," he begged again like a small child, like he did in the cave when he still thought she had betrayed him. Lyanna let herself sink backward, dragging him with her, glad that there was no Kingsguard standing in front of their door, but only a black dragon.

If she was to howl, or to screech in the height of her pleasure, and shamelessly give word to all of her long time suppressed desires, she'd rather not have anyone else witness it. Lyanna was after all a Stark, and the Starks would never do such an undignified thing.

Except maybe in the hour of the wolf, when the blood of the earth in the north would run hot, under the fat layer of snow hiding it.

**Sansa**

Morning came too soon behind the coloured windows, and Sansa never closed an eye. Arya, on the other hand, was still asleep. So was Nymeria, who appeared under their bed while Sansa was gone to see the king and the queen.

Sansa had never seen Nymeria still for such a long time before, even if she guessed that the direwolf must have rested once in a while, and probably during daytime. The king came in person, to check on both of them, when Sansa broke her fast, and calmed her about Arya's condition. "This sleep is healthy", he said with a smile, an ornament the Elder Brother so rarely wore, "not cursed, and it will help her heal."

A thin sword was brought in by the foreign maids, and laid above the hearth in an ornate scabbard. "Courtesy of Princess Daenerys, for the Lady Arya," the maids said and departed.

Before midday meal, Gendry peered in as well. He knocked, and the first thing that entered was his mace, and only the second one his body.

"You will have to wait a bit more," Sansa told him. "Arya is still asleep, but from this sleep she should wake."

It was so easy to turn him away, muttering words of gratitude, and Sansa desired the same would be true for her unwanted suitor.

The midday meal came an passed faster than a summer storm.

Sansa spoke politely to Aegon, and to Lady Jeyne, through Aegon. "Aegon is happy to understand me better", Jeyne said, modestly. _They are happy with so little,_ Sansa realized. And seeing them, Sansa felt diminished in her selfish longings, and more prepared than the night before to receive her would-be suitor as propriety and custom demanded it.

 _I can say no,_ she reminded herself.

After the meal the time had stopped, running nowhere, moving nowhere. There was nothing left to do but to return to her rooms and wait.

She remained in an antechamber, so that Arya could have her rest in the main bedroom. A basket of needlework rested in her lap, but she could not make a single stitch. Restless, she set it on the table. The sun was high up in the sky and it appeared as if the sunset would never come that day.

A flutter of steps echoed down the corridor. _Ladies,_ she thought, _a man would not walk like that, not even Lord Varys in his slippers…_

Maids she did not know brought in a gown, a most delicate garment Sansa had ever seen. It was resting on a headless wooden doll in a size of a woman, for laying it on a chair or on the bed could ruin it before usage. The bottom silk was of the light colour of the sand, with a faint shine to it, as if the drops of gilded rain crystallized on its surface.

The upper layer of the gown was sewn of blue winter roses...

One after another, just like when Ser Loras Tyrell rode to the Hand's tourney in a cape woven with flowers of his house.

The gown was like that, and yet it was different, for the roses were alive and fresh, and their petals could move with the breeze above the silk. They were much larger than Sansa had ever seen them, and their smell filled the small antechamber with an unspoken promise. The stitches fitting all of it together were meticulous, the work of a seamstress precious and unique.

It was a gown worthy of a queen.

But Sansa no longer wished to be a queen.

Another set of steps was approaching, a thud of armoured boots.

 _Ser Willas is a cripple,_ she thought, hating herself for the brutality with which she remembered that. _His step would not be so even._

She stood up to look at the gown once more, too nervous to remain seated. She rubbed her hands to hide her unease.

Then, the man opened the door without knocking, and she could not bear to turn around and see. She kept staring at the gown as if it were the only thing in the room.

He spoke behind her, then.

"Is it not to your liking?" he said, in a hoarse vulnerable whisper. "I thought of… I thought of having such a gown made for you when… When I saw the fields of the bloody blue flowers in Highgarden the morning you were gone from my bed. It was the only thing I could think of as I rode out to face Euron Greyjoy… Blue on the colour of the sunlight and how it would cut through all the grey shadows of that evil day… I never thought I would be able to…"

Dread abandoned Sansa's body, and the gown looked a thousand times more beautiful than it did before. She turned at length to face him, and smiled.

"It is very pretty," the words escaped her in an excited sigh, and then she was unable to speak any further, uncertain if Sandor Clegane's arrival meant what it should mean, or if she was just being silly again.

Aloof, she returned to her courtesies, hoping she was not making a terrible mistake.

"It was you who wanted to speak to me," she said, swallowing _my lord_ at the last moment.

"Aye," he said. "Would you have wished that it were someone else?"

"No," she said instantly. And then, impatiently. "If it please you, I would now hear you out."

"Lady Sansa," he said, swallowing his pride as she had choked on the treatment he hated. "Would you be my wife?"

The words were spoken, simple and crude.

"Yes," she said, offering him his hands, unconsciously.

He took them both and brought them to his parched mouth, tasting them as a man thirsty after a too long voyage would gulp fresh water.

"Warden of the South?" she had to know. Did he too change with the times? Did he want her for her claim? Was such a thing possible for a man spitting on the knights and their vows?

He unwillingly let go of her hands. "Only on parchment," he said, too embarrassed to explain. "And only if you truly want me and do not change your mind. Willas will be the Lord of Highgarden, and I will ride with the Elder Brother... with the king. "

She took _his_ hands then, and looked him in the eyes.

"There is much to be done in a short time," she said and savoured the wild glimmer she saw in there with guilty pleasure. "Please, call anyone's maids."

He hesitated, casting his gaze down. "Why?" he had to know too.

"I need help to adjust my wedding gown," she was swift in reply, giving a brief glance to the wonderful gift he had brought for her. "I trust that the king will come and lead me to the godswood as soon as they are done, in a place of… my Father."

"Tomorrow morning?" he asked, shy for the asking.

"Then you should call those maids in haste," Sansa said, and suffered a small deception when the Hound rapidly obeyed, and left her, like a good dog he sometimes claimed to be.

Giddy as she had not been since the first night after the Hand's tourney, Sansa observed the basket with needlework and her wedding gown with new eyes.

It was going to be a long day, and an even longer night.

**Aegon**

Aegon sat with Jeyne in a much smaller chamber he now occupied, close enough to the apartments of the king and his sister, but also to the outer walls of Maegor's Holdfast. The view of the sea through the open window was dear to his heart. And fresh air seemed to please Jeyne who was seated on a chair next to it, learning to read. The scroll she bent over was concerned with the building of ships. Aegon unwillingly smiled at her choice of subject.

"My lady," he said, "shouldn't we choose something lighter? A poem of Jenny of Oldstones…"

The sadness in her dead eyes cut his words in two. _Shut up,_ he cursed himself, _she is suffering too. It is precisely those songs we should never read._

He sat on the floor facing her and observed an image of a dromond on the parchment she looked at.

"Most ingenious sails," he said. "Well tailored for a long journey."

" _Sails_ ," he thought she heard her repeat in her quaint way of speaking.

An odd breeze entered then, under the hollowness of the door, and through the open window. Aegon stood up and looked for his sword, uncertain what threat could find their way to them at that moment. The battle was well over, for the time being.

The door opened seemingly of its own accord, and a gale of wind struck them, lowering Jeyne's hood against her will.

An outline of another hooded figure was painted in the door frame. Aegon knew her immediately, as did all the people in King's Landing since the night before.

"Go away," he said with hatred. "Haven't you done enough to her?"

A gurgle from the door was cold, determined, unstoppable, and he could not understand it. Confirming Aegon's worst suspicions, Lady Stoneheart started walking towards Jeyne murmuring something about the price for the return of her daughters, if Aegon's senses were not playing him for a fool.

"Leave us be," he said barring the way with his blade, remembering scarce lessons about fighting wights he put to practice in Highgarden. _I have to cut her in pieces, and then I have to burn her…_

But there was no fire burning in their hearth, or anything to make fire with in their chambers, as Jeyne was so afraid of it herself, and Aegon would do anything, he'd go to any length, to ease and embellish the shade of her existence. Since he had known the truth about his origin he was overwhelmed by the belief that it was fair: Aegon's love would be as sweet, as deep, and as desperate as the love of his parents. Until the unavoidable end.

The creature was insistent. Lady Stoneheart lowered her hood and shrieked at Aegon, waving her bony long-clawed arms under the black gown.

"You will not pass," he said, and raised his sword. Jeyne was cowering behind him, scroll on ships clutched to her chest, as if parchment could shield her from the arrival of doom.

He hoped that maybe Drogon would hear Lady Stoneheart's screams, and leap to his aid. But that would be too much to hope for. For the first time since he learned the truth, Aegon regretted not being the blood of the dragon.

He would be the blood of anything if that could help Jeyne.

Lady Stoneheart lost her patience. She rushed forward with all her forces. When Aegon lowered his blade, he didn't slice her head off, only one dead arm at the height of an elbow. The other arm of his attacker squeezed Aegon's throat and threw him several feet away as a rag. He landed harshly with his weapon, and with the limb he cut, oozing black blood. His head hit the stone floor hard, and for a moment he did not see.

When he reopened his eyes, he was immediately on his feet, but what he saw made him freeze in his steps.

Lady Stoneheart held Jeyne firmly pressed against her body with the remaining arm. Both of their heads were uncovered. Soft raven hair mingled with the dead auburn locks as a nest of dead and a nest of living snakes brought together.

The older woman was kissing the younger one fully on her mouth, as a lover would. Jeyne struggled, but she was not strong enough to escape her embrace.

Aegon felt warm tears running down his pretty face.

"Jeyne," he whispered.

And as if his sigh held a magic of its own, the grip of Lady Stoneheart seemed less, her arm uncurved and fell to her side.

Jeyne crumpled, falling to her knees, the scroll concerning ships slid to the floor. Lady Stoneheart followed, falling down hard, harder than Aegon ever did. She hit the ground as a dead, not a living corpse, finding the final grace in her demise not to land over her victim.

Aegon ran forward and took Jeyne in his arms before her head would hit the floor too. He embraced her as his tears continued to fall, warm and uncalled for in a man grown. She was silent in his arms, and he feared that she had died in truth.

He trembled from fear, until he recognized that the _unimaginable_ may have come to pass.

Sharply, he looked at Lady Stoneheart, sprawled before them. Her eyes were open and glassy, yet they did not move, and they did not see. Black blood stopped running from her elbow. Lady Catelyn Stark looked beautiful, just like her daughter Sansa, only older. She looked in peace.

Not daring to believe what his senses told him, he glanced at the young woman in his arms. Her hair was still a mantle of soft black silk as it had always been. Her skin was still ghastly pale, and she had not an ounce of rounded flesh over her tiny well-shaped bones. Only her height bore witness that she was of the same age with Aegon, maybe a name day or two in front of him.

But Aegon's body did not lie to him, not at all, for Jeyne stirred in his arms.

And her entire body was warm.

"Aegon," she said and he could hear her for the first time since they had met. _Her voice._ "What has happened to me?"

"You will be all right," he said. "We will be all right, I think," he told her, silently thanking any gods who would listen, and the corpse in front of him, for returning Jeyne fully to the world of the living.

Lady Stoneheart had walked on Westeros for vengeance.

But the Lady Catelyn Stark must have found honour in death, remembering she had it in life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Too fluffy??


	53. North and South

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Mance finds what he did not allow himself to seek

**Mance**

Mance found Lyanna in one of the many courtyards of the Red Keep, on her feet with the first light, practising archery with young Robert Arryn.

"You could not sleep either," he said, omitting the royal title, more upset than a giant cornered by the Thenns. What he had to say, would not come easy.

"No one slept properly," Lyanna told him, and her face shone. "There may be time for that tonight. Or not, who can tell?"

The eagle and the hawk rested their feet on the great archery target, crowing every so often to the arrival of the faint sunlight, still hidden like a shy maiden behind pink-coloured clouds. It would be a calm autumn day in the city of King's Landing. Mance's heels itched since the end of the mummery to leave the comfort of its walls, and head back north.

Yet he had to wait, for he would go back there only with an army, and first...

He had to tell Lyanna about Benjen Stark. The burden of secrecy became too heavy to bear, shadowing him at every step, like a huge bear of the north chasing its prey from a distance. But that morning Mance felt as if the bear came close enough, and it would jump to kill, if Mance did not talk.

"I thank you," he said, giddily scratching the frame of his lute with his overgrown fingernails, unwilling to touch the strings. What he had to say, deserved at least the respect of silence. "For not letting me speak last night."

"But now you would wish to speak, I understand," she said, shooting an arrow close to the centre of the target better than most men. Nonetheless, the queen sighed, unhappy with the effort. Then she stepped aside, and Lord Arryn assumed the stance of an archer.

"Place the bow somewhat higher," the queen counselled the boy. "You have grown, and you have to change the posture. You wouldn't want to shoot your falcon by chance."

Mance said in a dark voice, laden with the weight of the confession he owed. "Should I not tell both you and Rhaegar?"

"Rhaegar is gone to oversee the mustering of such an army that can be taken north in haste. Ravens will be sent to ask for more soldiers to follow on the way north. I will do as much for the supply train as can be done in one day. There have been sinister tidings from the upper part of the Riverlands... We cannot tarry."

"And Rhaegar is stubborn enough to start his day by seeing someone I have no wish to look at, for there are some living souls for whom I have no mercy in mine," Lyanna said, and her features turned sharper than the obsidian blade Mance had given her. "I met Cersei and Jaime Lannister only once when I was a girl. Ser Jaime was all innocence, and Lady Cersei, she was already cold and in love with power. The girls, and the women can mostly see each other for what they are. And I would hate to commit an atrocity, and give reason to the barbarians here in the south who believe all of us to be the bloodthirsty wildlings... The Wall matters not to them."

"As it should have not mattered to us, in the north," Mance observed, forcing a short laugh from his too big mouth. "But it did."

The queen must have heard that his heart was not in his words. She withdrew towards the porch and sat on a wall under a semi-circular arch, a few steps away from the little lord, who was still attempting to take the correct stance for shooting

She sat and she kept her silence, waiting. _There would be no help for me to speak_ , Mance knew.

"I was a young crow," he said. "But you know that well, for you knew who I was, before I knew you, wolf woman, or eagle woman, as you wish. And running away from the crows is death in your kneeler laws. Yet you forgot to tell that to Rhaegar. And he… the Elder Brother must have understood that from our travels just as well, if he so wanted... And as he said himself, he may be kind, but he's not yet out of his wits, Targaryen or not."

"There has been enough death," Lyanna said, staring at Mance. And waited again, grey eyes knowing, or sensing the truth.

"Once, years ago, we caught your brother Benjen, ranging..." Mance finally said.

"He was with two other men, and them, they were immediately killed in a fight, but he, he had been captured. Benjen Stark who never shot a wildling as most of his sworn brothers of the Night's Watch would do without hesitation. His was the blood of the First Men and that of Bael the Bard... He truly was ranging, discovering the trail of the enemy of old, which reappeared with the late summer snows on my side of the Wall, not using his duty as an excuse to hunt free folk like game..."

"But my people would not hear any of that. They wanted his blood spilled in the snow, as a sign that we could have victory… They cornered me into taking his life... I caved in in as a craven and I've regretted it ever since. There was a man called Lord of Bones who rather wanted to be called the King-beyond-the-Wall in my stead. He brought Benjen, and demanded I serve him the justice of the north. He challenged me to swing the sword of justice, in mockery of the customs on your side of the Wall. I said I would not slaughter a man unarmed who had committed no crime. Then they made a mummer's farce of a trial by combat, giving him a sword made of bones, where I held hard steel, stolen from the Wall, like my first cloak... I made it fast, but it was no mercy."

"It was still murder.'

"And then, then… I bent over Benjen, dying slowly in the snows. He looked at me with dark, almost black, _forgiving_ eyes... There is no other way for a bard to sing of them. Then he looked towards the weirwood grove not too far behind the clearing we stood on, and closed them. It was like his last wish, of a kind."

"I stood up and a fey mood came over me. I nearly butchered the Lord of Bones and a dozen among the free folk who were watching Benjen die. They ran away from me in my wrath as I ran after them with my sword, cutting a limb or two, a braid of hair or a piece of furs, as I went. No one had questioned my leadership after that."

'With them gone out of my sight, I didn't persecute them any further. Because it wasn't them deserving of death. It was me. It was me who gave in to an unjust plea of my people. It was me who had not have enough force to prevail over the free folk, where only the strength of body and the word spoken with conviction count, for there are no laws... But in that instance, the Lord of Bones had been stronger."

"So I was left alone with your brother's corpse, still warm on the ground.'

"That too, was more than I could bear. I dragged Benjen to the wood, under the canopy of a tree of the old gods he looked at, and I cried. In haste, I hunted down a wolf. I brought it back to the place where Benjen died, and burned it as is our custom, so that my people could see and smell the fire catching a carcass from afar."

"When I returned to the weirwood, to weep over my former sworn brother's body, it was gone without trace from the freshly fallen snow."

"I have never seen him as a wight, but I have lived ever since with the knowledge of what I had done. I have not only murdered him: _I_ condemned him to a life that none of us wanted... Not me, not him. An existence cursed by the old gods, serving the white walkers, as predators of our own kind..."

Lyanna did not say a word. Her gaze had slowly turned somber, as Ned Stark's had become in Winterfell when Mance came to amuse the royal guests. Stark must have been pondering going south, and being the Hand of the King... heading to the place where he would meet his death, like his father and firstborn brother before him.

The arrow of Lord Arryn came close to Lyanna's in the middle of the target. The birds cried and lifted flight, to greet a new day. Sweetrobin took a seat on a low porch wall next to the queen, his own brown eyes darkening to a shade of grey. The two wargs stared at the singer, proclaimed the King-beyond-the-Wall against his own will.

"It is sad," Lyanna finally spoke at length. "And I wish it had been different. But to know Benjen's destiny we have to go north. I am too far to tell."

"Tell what?" Mance blurted. "What is there left to tell?"

Lyanna and the lad looked at each other.

"My brothers Brandon and Ned did not take part in my gift," she admitted, almost against her will. "But Benjen, Benjen did."

"Benjen Stark was an elk," Robert Arryn said with admiration.

"Or maybe he still is," Lyanna said. "The eagle may have seen a man riding an elk, accompanying a giant, and some children of men in lands far beyond the Wall. It was the first time I warged into her by chance after twenty years, when I was on a ship, during the long return voyage to Westeros. But I was too weak and too far to fly with her for long and see through her eyes. Just like what I did to call her back to me later on, it was already dangerously close to losing myself. She is not young any more."

"She most likely lived that long only because of you..." Mance dared saying.

"That be as it may," Lyanna would not be interrupted. "If the wights we have encountered here in the south can be used as a measure of sorts, than mayhaps you have given Benjen a way to exist beyond the Wall. To go on ranging beyond the limits of a man. For it was you who murdered him, and maybe it was you who unwillingly brought him back to life, and not the walkers, by your regret and by your suffering... Like Gendry did with Jeyne if Aegon did not lie to me..."

"It is too much to hope for, and a grim fate, nonetheless," Mance said. "It brings no comfort."

"As if your own fate, or mine, had not been grim, Mance Rayder," she said, darkly, "Rhaegar did mention that you have had the honour of meeting the latest Lord Bolton and his bastard heir.. We have to find a way to exist with the choices we made, for better or for worse. And to choose better if we are given a chance."

"Yet," Lyanna continued in a lighter mood, "if after all this time you bear any true affection to me, or Rhaegar, I would bid one thing of you as a token of good will, before we return north on the morrow..."

"Anything," Mance vowed.

"Don't be too fast in offering when you don't know what it is that I ask! It may be above you _male_ strength," she mocked him. "Go back to your quarters now. A guest, or two, will come to you to break their fast, I reckon. I would have you treat your visit with _respect._ Or I may still have your balls chewed off by an eagle and hung on a spike above the Red Keep. It's never too late for that. _"_

"And I thank you too," she said, "for I have heard enough of the mummery to know that when you met Jon, you have made a wiser choice. It is more than Rhaegar or me had any right to demand of you."

"Go now," she said with a great strength of will, holding her sorrow back. "Go with the old gods, Mance Rayder, before I change my mind."

"Your Grace," Mance unwillingly accorded Lyanna the title she wore.

He did not hear when she whispered after him.

"And I thank you, my old wildling friend, for the song that healed Rhaegar, and brought the two of us back together. May we find the strength needed to help your people, in payment of that debt."

**Sandor**

Sandor Clegane followed King Rhaegar Targaryen to a lavish house of some rich people of a rather low birth he barely heard of, with the first hour of the day.

"It must be here," Rhaegar said, "if Cersei's former servants do not lie." He knocked at the door, and a frightened woman led them in immediately, recognising the purple-eyed King, and his fearsome shield.

The yard of the house was rattling and squirming with carriages, despite an early hour. Men-at-arms and servants were preparing to travel in equal measure.

An elderly looking woman in a green travelling dress, with a face of Cersei Lannister, but none of her demeanour, rushed forward, seemingly eager to greet them. The Hound touched the pommel of his sword, and Rhaegar made a step back, nervously wringing his long-fingered hands.

"My lords," she said in a sweet melodious voice, the only remnant of the former golden queen and her legendary beauty. Her green eyes wore a pathetic, insipid look, devoid of recognition. The yellow specks that could frighten men were gone, and so was the grace of her tenure. She seemed old, older than Lord Tywin, and uglier too. The Hound would almost have pitied her, but compassion was hard to come by in his nature. Unimpressed, he spat on the ground.

"Have you seen my brother Tyrion?" she simpered. "He is very small but he is the only brother I have. A real treasure. I love him with all my heart!"

"No," Rhaegar said truthfully. "I have never seen Tyrion."

"Pardon me, then," she laughed. " I shall pick up some flowers now, and than I will be taught to sing. Have I pleased you, my lords? I so hope that I did! If you see my brother, do tell him that I was searching for him. He will be pleased."

"We will," the Hound rasped to make her go away, when Tommen Lannister showed up in the yard as well, and caught his mother's arm.

"Come, mother," he said.

"Who are you?" she asked her son, honestly surprised. "I am a maiden yet unwed, not a wife or a mother. Where is my little brother? I should so much wish to find him. He is so kind, and clever! I will bring him flowers!"

With that she backed off towards one of the walls of the house, jumping on one leg. She picked up three fat stems of a green flowerless plant growing in between the masonry of the mansion, and placed them to her nose. Her features tensed as if she had been enjoying the perfume of the weed which had no smell at all.

"She has been like this since she woke up after the mummery," Tommen said. "I had her watched all the time. Last night she started a small fire in the middle of her chambers, and then she was just staring at the flames and singing lullabies to uncle Tyrion, saying he was not the brother who was destined to murder her. Seeing that and with your leave, Your Grace, I have decided to go back to Casterly Rock. She will have better care over there."

"And no wildfire to play with," the Hound observed. "She was the only one who could have toppled that jar open before Euron Greyjoy tried his last rebellion so far, during the mummery... the pyromancers being all accounted for..."

Tommen bowed his pretty curly head, neither confirming nor denying the dog's perspicacious assumptions.

If she wakes," Rheagar said quietly, "to health, I mean. Or to herself, as she had been before… this…, you will have to be very careful. She might turn even more cruel to others then when she was a queen."

"I understand," Tommen said.

"Do you now?" Rhaegar asked slowly. "It is a difficult decision, and it is not right for one so young as you to be forced to make it."

Before a continued glance of confusion on Tommen's young face, the king was forced to elaborate. "Had I returned from the Trident with life, your father, Ser Jaime, would have spared me that same decision with regard to Aerys II, my father. I honestly do not know what I would have done. The way he became, my father had to be stopped."

Tommen bowed his handsome head even lower.

"Get a good maester, boy! Give him enough of your gold!" the Hound barked. "The Citadel is not far from the Rock. Have her watched and let her pluck some better smelling flowers, and both of you will be fine."

"I will care for her," Tommen said to the Hound. And then to the king: "My dead brother Joffrey used to say that when a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin… It can go either way for either of us, to wisdom, or to madness, can it not?"

The king looked in the boy's eyes, confirming his doubts, not sweetening the truth with any feigned consolation.

"Then, Your Grace," Tommen said, "I will pray to the gods for the strength to do what I must, and for the light to know what has to be done."

"I wish I could give you daisies, my lords," Cersei peeped again, handing them each a piece of weed she plucked. "But we will have to wait for spring to have those... Come and see me and my little brother in the false spring..." she sang in a weak voice.

"And my father?" Tommen asked then. "I have not seen him since you have ordered him to the godswood, Your Grace."

"Viserion left the city before I left the palace," the king said. "I believe that your father was with him. But he will never forget you, and the westerlands are not far for the wings of a dragon."

"The Merryweathers will go with me," Tommen wanted to talk some more. "They may have their own interests in our family gold, but they are still the least dangerous company I can find. Their son is of my age and seems to be a lad good enough."

"It is so," Rhaegar said. "Rely on them when you can, and beware of them when you have to. The people are as they are. We have to be grateful for what they can give, and not expect what they cannot."

"Thank you for your counsel, Your Grace," Tommen said. "I have learned one thing well: I will never sign an empty parchment again for as long as I live."

The Hound chuckled. "A clever decision, boy."

"For my part," Rhaegar concluded, "I will write to Prince Doran Martell, and I will not forget to recommend him to treat your sister, Myrcella, with respect. It is the least I can do."

With that, the king and Sandor Clegane took leave of Tommen and the Merryweathers, discarding the flowers Cersei bestowed on them as soon as they were out of the door.

"I nearly killed her, you know," the king told the Hound. "I didn't know who she was or what she may be to me, and yet my own hands nearly choked the life out of her. What does that say of me? She called me her valonqar then, I believe. Her brother… her murderer… Lady Brienne would have stopped me, I hope, if I did not somehow reined myself in just on time. The prophecy of the maegi may have been real, like the curse on my wedding gifts. It is just that Cersei misunderstood which sibling would be her doom..."

"Prophecies are bigger lies than the songs," the Hound rasped with contempt, "so vague that whatever comes to pass, the prophet can say he had predicted it."

"Lyanna would have condemned her to death," Rhaegar said, "yet I could not, and I may live to regret it."

"What is done, is done," the Hound was indifferent and impatient to continue the day.

"Like your impending marriage on the morrow, brother," the king jested.

"Shut up," the Hound said, forgetting the courtesies due to the king, whose purple eyes shone with something akin to glee.

Sandor Clegane could not close an eye since Sansa accepted his proposal. And having to postpone it for a day due to king's business was likely a sign that it was not meant to be. He found her sleeping when he came to her rooms before dawn, and he had no heart to wake her up. So he scribbled his regrets on a peace of parchment, and left it under her sewing basket before he followed the king.

There was one more door to visit, one more house with the garden, one more lady to see, always one more thing to do.

The lady was not alone.

Ser Barristan sat on a bench in a garden accompanying Tristana Waters, with two cups of milk with honey resting next to one another on the table between them.

"Soon there will be no honey left," Tristana complained. And stood up rapidly when the king opened her door. "Your Grace," she said.

"My lady," Rhaegar replied graciously. "Do sit down again. I will not stay long. I merely wish to offer my apologies in person for the way in which I visited you last. Forgive me. I was not myself."

"There is nothing to forgive," she spoke with wisdom of old age. "The truth will out, at times, in its sheer nudity..."

"Ass naked truth," the Hound grunted, enjoying the outrage on the face of Ser Barristan.

"We shall depart tomorrow," the king said to Ser Barristan. "Take your leave until then. My sister is in agreement with me on that count."

"Thank you, Your Grace," the lady bastard from the crownlands was faster to speak than the honourable knight of the Kingsguard, pouring more of milk in the cup that the old man had nearly emptied in a hurry, expecting to be called for duty.

The rest of the day was a blur, of swords, of armour and men.

The Hound could barely feel his legs, or his boots, when they were returning towards the Red Keep, late in the evening.

There, the bells tolled, ominous and sorrowful.

 _There will be no wedding vows_ , Sandor Clegane understood, _not today, not tomorrow, not ever, with my luck, were I ten times the heir of Ser Duncan the Tall!_ The thing he still didn't believe in. And even if he were, so was Gregor. What did that say of the hero of old? That he could sire monsters just like anyone else... The Hound shivered at the thought that a child of his blood could be just like his late brother.

The bells tolled mercilessly. Someone of importance had died.

**Gendry**

Gendry could not believe his eyes when Aegon and Jeyne came to his room that morning. She was wearing a light woollen dress, and no hood at all. Aegon kept in the back, light-hearted, young and shy.

"Jeyne," Gendry exclaimed. "How?"

"Gendry," she said in a voice he remembered from the Inn at the Crossroads, somewhat older and wiser for what she had been through. "Please, you have to help us. Lady Stoneheart... Lady Stark… She lies dead in Aegon's rooms since yesterday. We… we must have fallen asleep last night… I was so tired… I don't know what they do with the dead in the royal palace."

Gendry did not know either, but finding Lord Connington and Lord Varys did not prove to be too difficult. They were the first ones in the small council chamber. The king and the queen were nowhere to be found, and the sleeping black dragon obstructed the way to their quarters. For some reason, no one attempted to wake Drogon.

"We will do the necessary," Lord Varys told them. "If you please, my lord Gendry, do go and tell her daughters. And the two of you, my lady," he said to Jeyne, almost winking with joy, "my prince," he turned to Aegon with more respect, "be free to retire until the vigil is held tonight. In the Great Sept of Baelor, I hope, in honour of the late Lady Catelyn's faith, if the septons have found some balance again after losing their... leader."

Lord Varys had spoken kindly, yet it was the most difficult command Gendry could have been given. With steps charged with apprehension, he walked to Lady Sansa's quarters, hoping that Arya was still asleep, and at the same time that she was not. The door was barred and he had to knock.

The girl who opened the door was still much shorter than him, but there had been no doubt that she had grown. Nymeria whinnied behind her, _in sign of friendship_ , Gendry thought, tempted to pet the direwolf, but he had no idea how Arya would take it.

"M'lady," he said, returning to his own unlearned way of calling her which he had abandoned long since. Yet it was all that he could say to Arya, awake, and prettier than he imagined she would be when she woke up.

"Gendry," she said with caution, and he could see how she still wasn't herself. _Small mercies,_ he thought, _or she might just hit me, or yell at me about how I abandoned her._

"It is about your Lady Mother," he said, "please, I would have to speak to you and to your sister."

"Oh, Sansa must have fallen asleep with her needlework very late last night. She is still resting. It must be her you came to see?" Arya said, and in her confusion, at least she opened the door. Gendry took it as an awkward sign to enter.

"Lady Arya," he said, and she let him in, reacting as if he shot her with an arrow, and not treated with respect. Sansa was asleep in a chair. A beautiful gown smelling on roses was carefully sat aside in one of the corners of the room, and remnants of seamstress work were scattered all over the floor tiles.

"I tried but I can't wake her," Arya said in disappointment. "I was hoping she would explain some things."

"Maybe I can?"

"You would?" Arya asked. "Are you not leaving? Where is the… the Brotherhood?"

"No," Gendry said. "There is no Brotherhood, not any more. We can... we can carry her to bed and tell her later?"

"Tell her what," Arya said, accepting his suggestion.

"Tell me what," Sansa said, drowsy, stirring awake from being moved by four clumsy hands against her will. "Where is Sandor? Where are the maids?"

"I couldn't care less where your dog is," Arya snorted with indignation. "And the three insipid hens left last night when they finished their work. I pretended to sleep during the last hour while they were here."

"Lady Catelyn," Gendry said cautiously, "she had brought Jeyne back to life. And to achieve that, she had given up her own..."

Sansa's eyes went wide open, and Arya's darkened. "Mother is dead now?" Arya asked. "Not like... not like Lord Beric?"

Gendry shook his head.

Before he understood what was going on, he was faced with the two Stark sisters weeping. Sobbing on one another, snivelling on Gendry's shoulders, or just plain crying. And when Arya's tears soaked his tunic, he thought that was not the way how he dreamed of seeing her again.

But it was a start.

**Mance**

Mance Rayder paced back and forth in his quarters, uncertain whom to expect. The walls of the chambers he was given lay heavy on his soul. He wished he could wait in a tent surrounded by snows, far away north from the Red Keep, to make his last stand on a more hospitable ground.

The knock at the door was gentle, so maybe his visit would not be coming to take his head, as a late sign of justice he could willingly accept from the Lady Lyanna Stark. They were both of the north, and the north did remember.

It was worse than that.

A ghost walked in, a vision of long blond hair painfully resembling that of Dalla, his woman. But the rest of the woman was wrong, thin and amber-skinned. Long layers of heavy skirts covered with furs on top were missing, and she was clad in brown leather suit as he had never seen before. Yet Mance could only stare at the steady long fall of pale blond locks, even much after he had recognised his unwanted visitor for who she was.

"If I knew my hair would please you as it goes with most men," Tyene Sand said, "I wouldn't have bothered so much to hide its natural colour as a pious septa..."

"I'm sorry," he said, forcing his gaze away.

"Are you?" she wondered. "For staring or for..." she swallowed her remark, for the first time since Mance Rayder had met her showing a sign of unease, and that, that, gave him the courage to say what he should.

"I am sorry for what I have done to you," he said. "It was not my place. I am ashamed by it, and it makes me less of a man, not more."

"I assume both of us have something to be sorry for," she said dryly, but he could see that she was pleased by his words. "I don't know what Lyanna told you but I'm not your only guest this morning. You see, Mance from behind the Wall, I am bound to travel south. One of my sisters disappeared on her way from Sunspear to King's Landing and we have yet to learn her fate. Also, Prince Doran will want to hear from someone who had seen it, someone of his trust, about the return of the true king. Our journey will be swift, and such riding is not for children..."

"Children?" Mance asked, not understanding.

"Mostly they like songs, you know," she said. "I did at least, when I was a child. And yours was quite pleasing. I wish I could have listened to it entirely, but, alas, I wasted some time convincing the guards to open the gates for us against Daenerys' orders…"

Mance harboured no doubts about what she must have done with those men. Unwillingly, he clenched his teeth, not liking the image in his mind a single bit. His thoughts must have shown vividly on his unkempt face because she laughed merrily, _flattered_ by them.

"Oh, not that, no," she said. "I was not in a good company to attempt anything like that. There are concoctions made in Dorne which cause death, and others which put you to peaceful sleep. And most guards love a glass of wine. The brave men woke up rather fast with a heavy head and they could still serve Daenerys behind the gates well closed, after I entered the city with my charge…"

"Your charge?" Mance inquired.

"Come," she said to someone standing in front of the door. "This," she said, "this is your father. I told you we were going to find him."

"Not a knee...ler" a soft voice said on the outside. A boy wondered in, on wobbly feet.

"No," Mance shook his head. "Never a kneeler."

"Good," Tyene said.

"How?" he asked her then, eyes wide.

"A bit of everything," Tyene said, "Ash... Queen Lyanna and me learned from the Lady Sansa that your heart or something dear to it had gone to the Citadel. With Lyanna's gift and my riding skills, it was not that difficult to find it. He was with a young northern woman in the castle of the Tarlys. She confirmed he was yours."

"But..." Mance wanted to say something, but she had cut him short.

"I did not come to seek your gratitude, Mance Rayder," Tyene said, and her dark blue eyes turned colder than the snows he loved so well. "When you look at your son growing, from time to time you can remember, if you so wish, that at least some vipers of Dorne may also have a heart."

"Farewell," she said and strolled out of his door, as if she feared to say another word.

"Fa...ther" the boy said, frightened, looking after Tyene. "Where did mother go?"

"South," Mance said to his son, not knowing any better, trying to sound reassuring. "And we have to go north first."

"First," the boy tried to repeat, clearly not understanding the word, and Mance wondered why he had pronounced it at all. It was not as if he wanted to see the viper again, was it? It was not as if he wanted to steal her.

"Fa..ther?" the boy said with some more courage. "First... I go with you?"

"Yes," Mance Rayder said, spreading his arms wide open to embrace his only son.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be one more chapter to this story after this one, to be published pretty soon as I have almost finished it.
> 
> Thank you to all who read, left a kudos or commented this story. 
> 
> If there is anyone interested in its continuation (sequel), let me know in any way you like.


	54. To the Weirwoods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the story ends

**Sansa**

"I will stay here and keep vigil," Arya said to Sansa.

Sansa tried to protest, insisting she was not tired, not tired at all. There was no mirror in the Hall of Lamps so Sansa could not see that her blue eyes were all hazy and watery. Anyone was able to tell how she struggled to keep them open.

"I have slept enough," Arya stated firmly towards all. "It is my turn to stay awake."

The new High Septon met Sansa, Arya and Gendry at the entry to the Great Sept of Baelor. The queen, Aunt Lyanna, was there as well. So were Prince Aegon and Lady Jeyne, who stood tall and timid, grasping Aegon's arm.

"Brother Benjen," Sansa said with surprise to His Holiness.

"He doesn't look like our uncle," Arya judged.

"No," Sansa said. "He was one of the monks on the Quiet Island where King Rhaegar used to live."

The new High Septon was dark of hair and skinnier than a rabbit gone hungry in autumn. He was very young for the high office of the Faith, barely past his twentieth name day. Newly elected, he tried to carry the crystal crown with dignity, but his face presented an odd mosaic of devotion and fear. He didn't know very well how to wear that crown, the one his predecessor had forsaken to appear more pious than he was proven in the end. His new Holiness knew even less how to wear the solemn robes that went with his function, but his feet remained bare as it was only proper, and his dark eyes shone with the true light of the Seven.

"Only two can remain here to hold vigil," the High Septon said as if he were quoting a book of rules he just read for the first time in his life in the observance of his duty. "One of her sons should stand guard."

"Her sons are all dead," Arya said and Sansa shivered from the horrible truth in her sister's words. "But of the two daughters she has, I would be more like a son."

"And I am," Gendry said, "not her son, but I have followed her as if I were... almost until the end."

Arya gave Gendry a quaint look, but the High Septon believed him. "Very well," he said. "You will hold vigil then. What of the bones? Shall we call the silent sisters?"

"My good=sister, Lady Catelyn, would not have wanted it," Aunt Lyanna said with respect. "But I am afraid that we have to burn her. It'll have to be a new custom for as long as the winter lasts, as sacrilegious as it may seem to the kingdoms of the south."

The High Septon looked down, and ho! He was the monk from the Quiet Isle others had called Benjen for his role in the mummery, the one who had seen the peril of the north. "Your Grace," he told the queen, "I have travelled through the riverlands… I have seen Them… It will be done as you say. I will instruct the oldest among the silent sisters... in the new ways... The ashes will be delivered to her daughters to bury as they please..."

The queen nodded, and ushered Sansa out of the sept. "You do have to rest," Lyanna said. "I slept some," Sansa rebelled.

But her aunt would have none of it. "You are not a warg, not fully, but you have come as close to harming yourself by your doing as any of us when we exaggerate in our gift. Tomorrow will be a big day for you, and there is nothing you can do here for your Lady Mother."

"But then, then," Sansa remembered she was to be married on the next day. The Hound left her a _note_ surprising her by his writing prowess. She supposed she always knew he could write, just like he could _read,_ but it was so unlike him that she almost considered it false, like the letters of hope Ser Dontos used to leave at Petyr's command. "It would not be proper to be wed-" she tried saying.

"-The old gods care not for the customs of the south," Lyanna said. "You can still say your vows if you so wish. I will borrow you an old travelling cloak of mine for your maiden cloak. The one I wore when Aerys had me kidnapped. It has a wolf or two on the fringes if not on the back. It'll be on a short side for you, but it will do. We have to find something for him..."

"-I have something..." Sansa's tired face brightened, remembering the treasure she brought to the capital all the way from the Vale, hidden in a small chest under her summer silks. She nearly forgot that the chest had made it to the fisherfolk too, just like her needlework necessities. And the poor honest people had brought all the mummers' belongings to the palace, receiving a just reward for all their trouble in golden dragons. _And they will have no need of new shoes for the rest of their lives_ , Sansa thought, remembering the pious offerings of the faithful of the Seven piled in front of their door.

"Good," Lyanna said.

Sansa shared a short cold supper with her aunt, of dried meats, bread, and some fruit. _The last fruit of the season,_ she pondered, with sadness. Summer had been cruel to her, but there was no way to know what the winter would be like.

"How did he know?" she had to know all of a sudden. "How did His Grace-"

"-Rhaegar " Lyanna corrected her. "We are alone."

"Sweetrobin must have told you everything about aunt Lysa," Sansa reshaped her doubts. "But how did Rhaegar know in his judgement that my mother resented my father for his so-called bastard and treated Jon unfairly? I've never told him any of that. And you… I am sorry to say so… But you were not there."

"My husband can be a jealous man," Lyanna said quietly. "About your mother, he must have guessed, by looking within himself."

Sansa remembered another man who could be awfully resentful, and readied herself to retire for the night. She would spend it alone. Arya would stay awake with Gendry, and Sandor must have still been accompanying the king.

Aunt Lyanna walked with Sansa to the door of her chambers, before she returned to those she shared with the king. The black dragon was also gone from the Red Keep. Only a few luminously dark scales scattered here and there reminded of his presence the night before.

When Sansa opened the door, the inside was shielded in darkness. Had the sky burned green on the outside, the sharp fear she felt would have reminded her of another night, long ago, when a battle raged around King's Landing, and a drunk armoured man hid in her bed. She searched for a candle, but she could find none.

Then, she spotted him. A dark hooded figure seated on the chair where she had been working on her wedding gown. The gown itself was set carefully aside by the maids before they left, so that neither Sansa in her slumber, nor Arya Underfoot in her lack of interest, would ruin the delicate adjustments by chance.

He wore boots, and his feet were on the table, unmoving.

She was terribly afraid then. Afraid that he was drunk, afraid that he was angry, afraid of what she had done to make him so... As he used to be.

Sansa was desperate for a candle, but she could still find none.

"My lord," she stuttered, hiding behind her courtesies once more, in fear of him as she had never been before, not even when she was a young girl, and he the killer guarding Joffrey. In terror of losing him, after she had savoured what they could be, together.

"I wondered this entire day what you would think of doing to refuse me," he said bitterly. "But I would have never thought of such a piss poor story. Your sweet dead mother giving her cursed life away for the girl she _hanged_ in cold blood in the riverlands. And by the time you have stopped mourning, I will have lost my head to grumkins somewhere in the north. Is that the way of it?"

Sansa could not believe her own ears. _Why do we always have to start from the beginning?_ she thought with resignation. Yet, her unease slowly melted for he was not drunk. Just angry. She could somehow handle that.

Rapidly, her chest broadened against her will, because it was still _him_. He came back to her. And more likely than not as soon as he was allowed to leave the king. Just as she wanted him to.

"Wait here," she said.

"I'm not going anywhere," he barked back. "I might just have what's mine, vows or not...Or will you call for your kingly uncle's pets to burn the dog to the ground for disrespecting you?"

"Just wait," she said, with more force. And scurried to the kitchens to do what she had intended to do on their wedding night. Her time has run out, and for all she knew, the day after the only bedding they could share would be on the side of the kingsroad if the gods were good.

She found only two people in the kitchens, a cook and a maid, about to be engaged in ways whose improper existence Sansa had only recently discovered.

"Pardon me," she bleated, politely, saying what she wanted.

Moments later, she was back to her chambers. Her heart sank very low in her chest and her decision faltered again. She wondered if what she was about to attempt was what she should have done when the Blackwater burned.

She concluded that no, she should not have.

Sometimes, her own thoughts on that night did not make any sense. Yet the truth that he had _left_ her then, untouched... In the condition he was in, crazed and craving the comfort of her bed… It planted the first seed of a love of a woman in her heart, deep in the soil already made soft and fertile by an innocent concern of a girl. The seed which would slowly bear fruit in her when he was gone. Even when she would blame him for abandoning her, in her loneliness.

 _For all of my days,_ she thought, nervous, mouth dry.

He was still seated, a bulk of a man, immobile. When the door closed behind Sansa, he said, as hateful as he could make it. "The bird flew back," he said. "Will you pat your dog's nose while we're waiting for the dragon?"

Sansa carefully set aside most of her fears, past and present, like she did with the wedding gown. The cook and the maid had helped her haul up a large case of candles from the kitchens. With quivering hands she started lighting them, placing them all around the smaller room, next to the table where her love was seated, brooding, at the entrance to the bedchamber, on window sills, and near the bed itself.

"What are you doing?" he asked, first sign of uncertainty creeping in his low voice, and with it, Sansa's courage grew.

 _There has been enough fumbling in the dark,_ she thought. _This time, my love, I will make you look, and see._

"What I should have done a long time ago," she said, "if I was only a little bit older."

He had nothing to say to that, so he just crossed his too long legs on the table, and pointedly looked away.

Sansa placed the last three candles on the table next to his feet. She could sense his anger burning, mingled with the lack of understanding, and something akin to well hidden hope that he would be proven wrong. A hope he was trying to quench, not to _hurt_ if he had been right.

"I should have looked at you," she said. "And I thought that this would be the way I would look at you on our wedding night. It seems now that we will spend it on the road, so tonight is as good time as any."

"Sansa," he said, "I was almost born a soldier. I know defeat. Spare me the pretty words."

Sansa shivered from the yearning hidden in his rasp, killing the last of her reticence. In the place where her fear used to be, there was something else, bubbling, gurgling, churning. Yes, they lay together, but never with enough time to clear the waters between them, if he could think again what he thought, that _she_ would lie about her mother's sacrifice...

"When have I ever lied to you?" she said, quietly, trying to look under his monk cowl which he _stupidly_ put back on his face. _I am starting to think like Arya,_ she realized and she was glad for it. Her sister was back, and it was more than Sansa could have hoped for.

The Hound had no answer to that.

She lowered his hood, and he didn't protest. His face looked tortured in the light of the flames burning in their chambers. Rejected and hopeful, more deranged than she was used to seeing him since the Quiet Isle. Swifter than Nymeria, Sansa removed one of his boots, and he hurried to undo the other one himself, shamed by her attention.

Of her own will she opened the laces of the gown on her back and stepped out of it, finding delight in the simplicity of a thick dark blue dress she donned for mourning. _The Tully colours._ It was as easily put on as off. His eyes went open, and dark, as he asked again.

"What is it that you should have done, years ago?" he inquired, almost timidly.

"I should have looked right through you," she said in a single breath. "It's just that I was afraid _for you._ "

"For me?" he laughed. "Scared like seven hells of me, more likely..." he retorted, and she didn't bother to answer.

She sat on the table in front of him, in a thin shift and smallclothes. Gingerly, she reached for the rest of the cloak he wore until it found its way to the floor. Her eyes roamed over his face, where anger melted into hope, dwindled into devotion, slid into unease, grew into desire, sailing freely over the muddy river of his scars.

"We have time," she said. "I have already mourned for my mother once. I will mourn for her again, but I will not do it tonight."

"We've done this before," she told the candles on the table, "but never without haste."

Her tiredness was gone as if by magic. The evening was still early, and the hour of the wolf far away. Selfishly, she was glad Arya stayed to hold vigil. _Gendry will like it_ , she thought to justify her joy.

"A hundred candles!" she sighed, "I wish I had a thousand I could light to look at you. And for you to see, and to believe it, every day, that I mean to be yours... That it's not a whim, nor a chirp, nor a silly girl's song. It's an honest one, like the one about my aunt and King Rhaegar. Can't you see?"

"Have your look then," he challenged her, pulling his tunic over his head.

Sooner than she could blink, his bare behind was seated on the chair, and he was provoking her to lower her gaze or turn it away.

She would not. If anything, she studied him more. That was what she longed to see since Highgarden, every last bit of him.

Wordlessly, she undressed too, to match him in deed. Remaining on the table, she wondered where the necessary calmness to do such a thing sprang from. Small goose pimples came over her arms, but there was warmth stemming from him, smoothing them. She caught her breasts, one in each hand, and turned them in circles, to find comfort. Still looking at his body, and at his face. _Would he let me braid his hair?_ the absurd thought came and went. She spread her hair free around her face and covered her breasts again, exposing the lower part of her body to his stare, enjoying his sudden muteness.

Slowly, when she had her fill of looking, as he would say it, she went to him in the candlelight. She didn't close her eyes when his skin, darker than hers, be it ugly or even, met her own. She started to discover with her lips all the surfaces her eyes had revealed first. The point of departure was his face, but she soon ventured further. Down. He held her then, his breath short and uncertain.

It was a new way of seeing.

Sansa started longing to feel his arms possessing her body, and to hurry the matters in a way they did it already twice. Still, she stopped herself, wishing their time to last longer, and wishing him to understand that it was not a passing thing, nor a change of tide or a season, but something grown in the depth of her solitude. An attachment that would not disappear over night, or in the light of a new day.

She went on her knees next to him, to trail soft kisses on his back, his stomach, his legs, and the parts she could not name. His hands went to her hair, guiding her, she guessed. When she was satisfied that she had covered all of it, and the grip on her head softened, urging her up, she obeyed it, and took his hand. The face that looked up at her when she was on her feet, quite a bit taller than him when he was seated, that face looked younger than ever before, emptied of mocking and of the ugliness of the soul. A dazed face of a man who longed for her as much or more than she had longed for him.

Slowly, he returned the favour of touching every part of her body. On his lap, on the table. And when his burned lips came between her thighs, she unwillingly crushed his head with her legs.

And she had to close her eyes, finding it unbearable to look, floating, bouncing, burning. The grin he gave her when she opened them again was feral and knowing. She was scooped from the table and she looked at their joined shadows dancing on the wall, while she was being carried to the bedchamber, sweat cooling on her brow, salty drops trickling under her hair.

They lay facing each other on their sides, and she was back to her senses enough to caress him from the top of his head until his knees. She thought he would laugh evilly at her attentions, but he just gazed at her, and let her do. _He must be tired as well,_ she thought.

But when he took her in his arms again, there was no mistake in what he wanted, and she could sense it from him as if his desire were an open scroll, ready for her to read. He then lay helplessly on his back and waited. Waited for her to take him.

And take him she did. Stricken by the power she was given.

Until it was all too much, and some of the smaller candles nearly burned to their end. Than she just fell on her back in the position her septa would approve of, and drew him towards her until she was almost buried under his weight, and all she could see was the fresh scar on his shoulder. She craned her neck to meet his eyes. Warm, and _trusting._ It sent her over the edge she didn't know existed, and the restless water of the sea took her while she struggled to breathe, to look and to breathe, until he was gone too and dived his head in her neck, biting it in his agony.

He rolled her on top of him again, and she kept on staring at his face, prompted on her elbows, until almost all the candles burned out, and the sleep gently came over her.

Bringing a dream where a hundred flames were a single one, of a vow never sworn, yet not less real.

"My love," he may have called her, in the end, as she smiled against his chest and slept, with the blessing of the old gods, and the new.

**Daenerys**

"One of my captains, Ben Plumm, he went to the new High Septon on my request, and obtained the annulment of the Lady Sansa's marriage to Tyrion. It turns out that he was already married as a young man. And there is no need to probe anyone's innocence," Dany told Rhaegar when he finally returned to the palace, and stopped by to see her, later that night. She could sense Drogon lying down in front of her door as the glimmering dark sensation of _flying long and well_ was born in her mind. _A good night wish of a dragon,_ she thought, amused, before she continued speaking to her brother. "Shall we celebrate the wedding of her choice? Despite Lady Catelyn's passing…"

She sat on the floor, lost among widely spread animal skins and carpets smelling on horse, as if she were staying in a vast tent mounted on the Dothraki Sea, and not in the Red Keep.

It often felt safer that way.

"Most definitely, sweet sister," Rhaegar said. "Let them speak their vows before it is too late. We are leaving, maybe never to return."

"I know," she said, "but that doesn't frighten me."

The blue dragon egg was in Daenerys' lap, and she was warming it with her hands, cradling it and rocking it from time to time as a mother would do to a child.

"I know what you mean," Rhaegar said.

Daenerys did not believe that he did, so she had to say. "Those warlocks, the skins they wore... The god who wished my death…The glass candle, the wooden masks that burn! The trees that have eyes!"

"Dragons, enslaved, _burning_ the entire city tower full of innocents," Rhaegar said with sorrow.

"Dragons, healing burns," his sister reminded him. "That must have been under your influence, sweet brother. And then the dragonglass brought into being by dragonbreath! Drogon cannot do it when he wishes, as far as I can understand him, only in some kind of desperation...

What I want to say, Rhaegar, is that there is so much magic, both here and over the water. And so many prophets and enemies I have met across the sea. They will never stop haunting me... Us..."

"If we can stay in Westeros, perhaps they will," her human brother answered with hope, treating her as an equal, a thing Viserys always omitted. "All the scrolls of the Seven Kingdoms tell us how the first Aegon conquered them by fire and blood, how everyone bent the knee to the power of the dragons, and how he forged the Iron Throne in fifty-nine days, and other such things."

"But what the scrolls do not tell is what it was, and how terrifying it must have been whatever Aegon and his sisters had run away from…"

"Dearest sister, we have both glimpsed but a little bit of the evil that awaits the dragons in the land where they came from... For my part, I am convinced that Westeros was not Aegon's conquest."

"It was his salvation."

"I am a bit like the dead kraken, you know," Daenerys stirred over the sea of skins, decided she could trust her brother, if only a little bit. "When I was in the thick of a battle for the city called Meereen, and when Viserion and Rhaegal were enslaved by the horn, I did... I did a peculiar thing..."

"I made Drogon exhale a jet of fire in my mouth and I swallowed it. It gave me the... the dragon voice... if I wanted to use it… and the ability to understand his speech better. And he… he became more tempered, less beastly… a bit less, in any case. I do not think that the wild nature of the dragons can ever be fully avoided. He showed me we should run as far away from the horn as possible, and we did... We returned when the battle was over. My forces had won, but two of my dragons were gone."

"It is now as if I were not only the Mother of Dragons and their blood, but also a breath of a dragon. That may be another reason why I hate Euron so much. I have become an abomination by my own reckless doing, just like he did..."

"Sister," Rhaegar said, bending to caress the brightly blue egg in her lap. "Do not burden yourself with what you cannot change. My beloved wife would say to that, that all the gifts of the old gods awaken with the arrival of winter. Or how else would the mortal men survive it? Tomorrow, after my brother's wedding, we will head north, to try and do our duty towards the land that saved us, the dragons, from slavery and certain death. We can do no less."

"I am glad I am no longer a queen over here," Daenerys said, yawning. "It's much easier when I can be a young girl, if only for a while."

"I am not young any more," Rhaegar said. "So you may become the ruler again some day, merciful and wise. But now I will be heading to see my own queen. An entire day without the blessing of her presence was too much to bear."

When Rhaegar closed the door behind him, Dany was glad for her brother. She accepted that a barren woman should not be the queen, and she would tell him that some day. Daenerys had instead a miracle of nature, an egg of another dragon about to hatch and become one more child of hers.

But Rhaegar, Rhaegar was loved. Dany doubted that she would ever meet a human man, or that she had met him in the past, with whom she would or could share a bond as deep as there seemed to exist between Lyanna and Rhaegar.

Maybe, if her sun and stars had lived… But he did not.

 _I will not despair,_ she told herself, and unlike before, she believed it. _The time of the dragons has come._

**Sandor**

The lute half wailed, and half rejoiced, on the way leading to the godswood from the Maegor's Holdfast. No words were spoken or sung, only the humble trilling of the strings could be heard on a pale, cold afternoon. The ashes of Lady Catelyn Stark had still not cooled down, stored in a stone vessel with the last remnants of her son Robb, ready to travel north with the last Starks.

 _It doesn't rain, at least,_ Sandor Clegane thought, waiting.

The army was almost ready to depart, and only the members of the mummers' company and the king's family followed the couple to be wed on their way. The king led Lady Sansa by the hand. The queen was already in the godswood, where she had effortlessly brought a man thrice her size, who wore a newly wrought black armour, and his old faithful sword.

The Hound had found it abandoned in his own quarters that morning, together with a small clasp in a shape of a viper, and a piece of parchment. _If ever you meet a Dornishman or a woman who hates your face,_ it said, _show this, and you will have their gratitude._ _Others take me,_ he thought then, _and all the Dornishmen with their insane ways..._

Silently, the queen handed him a folded white cloak.

"This?" he tried asking, but no proper answer came.

"I trust that you have seen some marriages when you were serving the Lannisters," Queen Lyanna said. "It's not that different before the old gods. It took the maids this entire morning to clean it properly."

Sandor Clegane dared to look at his bride to be.

She held the king's arm, proud and tall. Light and not diminished by what life forced upon her. The winter roses glimmered on the pale sand coloured foundation of the gown _he_ gave her, and her hair shone above it all, raised in a southron style.

 _"It will be in the memory of my mother,"_ Sansa had told him before he left her bedchamber that same morning. _"I suppose I will be wearing it the northern way from now on,"_ she added.

The Hound did not dare asking her plainly if it meant she would also ride north with the army. There would be few enough women who went. Most of the highborn ladies would retire to the faraway castles, and wait for the men to return. If they were to return, after the Long Night the gloomy voices were forecasting.

Sandor Clegane supposed Sansa _Stark_ would want to go north anyway, wed or not, but he lacked the strength to confirm his thoughts either way, too afraid to merit an answer he did not desire. Happy for not having a castle where she could withdraw to wait for him… Highgarden was his only on parchment, he didn't lie to her about that, and the Clegane towerhouse was a ruin, and very far away. The presumption that both he and Gregor may have shared a famous ancestor of the Kingsguard would not have repaired it, or planted crops for its people. He hoped that the peasants did a good job of feeding themselves, once the place was thoroughly emptied of Gregor and his men. The Hound would gift them the castle and never see it again if he could. It did not bring many good memories.

It was selfish, and Sansa wouldn't be _safe_ if she went north, but at least he would be the one looking after her. He didn't trust anyone else with that daunting task any more. If he ever did.

 _And a bedding before the wedding,_ he remembered, fondly. He had done _things_ with Sansa he had never done before with any other woman, every time more so. He almost desired he would misunderstand her again, and get all rabid more often, if that was her way of showing him the truth.

 _Better not,_ he mused, hoping he could be a good dog, most of the time, reluctant to gamble with his newly found happiness. _If a dog can only be kicked so many times, what can be said about the wolf? How long will it be before she tires of proving me wrong…Or flies away …?_ He didn't know what he would do if she ever left him after being his. Only that it wouldn't be pretty.

Sansa knelt in front of the heart tree, among the red dragon grass, its colour fading to rusty orange after the autumn rains. The black dragon circled in the sky, as yet another guest, or the only guard, present at the wedding.

 _What will I say?_ the Hound thought of a vow he would make. He should make some vow, he supposed, and the words to be spoken to the old gods were not predetermined like in the sept. They had to be said, and meant, from one's own head, and hopefully the heart. The latter, he was not certain he could do it, with everyone watching.

He stepped forward, ready to commit the greatest atrocity of his life by binding Sansa to himself in marriage.

The lute stopped playing, and all the guests looked at the couple in the middle, in unbending silence.

He removed the maiden's cloak from Sansa's shoulders, a simple thick cover in deep greys, with tiny direwolf heads embroidered on the borders. Putting the wolf-cloak over his large armoured arm, he slowly unfolded the white cloak Lyanna had given him.

 _It can't be,_ he thought. There, in his hands, was the once bloodied white cloak he wore as a Sworn Brother of the Kinsguard. He thought he shed the useless thing somewhere on his drunk ride out of King's Landing after the battle of Blackwater.

 _I must have truly left it in her rooms,_ he figured, _and she has kept it all this time. A memory of me, the broken man… The killer cut down to tears by a chant of mercy…_

It was the most tender vow he could have received.

Wordlessly, he wrapped her in his cloak, not tossing it that time, covering her properly as his greatest treasure. The others would not be allowed to give her a single look, as far as the dog was concerned.

She stood up, wearing his cloak, and put both arms on his chest, looking at him, waiting for him to speak. He embraced her, lacking words, lost in the smell of roses from her gown, and the other scent, distinctly Sansa's, making his head turn.

And there, in the south he was from, in the field of dragon's breath, in front of the trees the northerners adored, with Sansa settled in his arms, the words came unbidden, and unasked for.

"I am yours," he said, "to do with me what you will, until I leave this world."

"As I am yours," she answered, "and yours I will remain for as long as one of us still lives."

It was too much to hope for that she would not marry again if she became a _widow_ , but the _noble_ idea pleased him nevertheless. He kissed her then, biting her upper lip, remaining both the Hound and Sandor Clegane, the man, thoroughly unable to be only one of them, most of the time.

The lute resumed its trilling when she pressed her nails in the back of his unarmoured neck, mirroring the kiss he gave her in a gesture of her own, marking him as _hers_. That, was good. It was something he could understand.

Than, easy as a bird, light-hearted as a kind woman she was, she freed herself from him, and started to rush away from the godswood. He followed close behind, and caught her by the hand. It would not do for him to let his wife stumble on the serpentine stairs on their wedding day.

The other guests followed, and the Hound, otherwise alert by nature to every change in his surroundings, could not see them. All he saw was the fluttering image of white, and pale gold and blue, with a tower of red hair above her fair face.

"Where to?" he asked, needing direction.

"To your chambers," she spoke sweetly. "I have already packed. It is my duty to help my lord husband to get ready for the journey as well. We have barely an hour left."

The Hound's face twisted, as he obediently trailed after his wife.

He had packed his own belongings the day before, and his fingers itched to undo her hair. _She said she'd wear it down for travelling,_ he told himself, hurrying in his steps.

**Brienne**

They arrived to the High Heart faster than Brienne thought they could. The desire to empty her stomach on Viserion's back was nowhere near as strong when Jaime was flying with her.

The Ghost of the High Heart was waiting for them, seated on a tree trunk. _She must have dreamed of our arrival,_ Brienne thought.

"Welcome," the old withered woman with red eyes said. And then, she stared at Jaime. "You have come to seek me out now that you know who you are," she said. "Just as I have dreamed."

Brienne witnessed how her husband's face paled.

"So it is true," he said.

"Why have you come to look for the confirmation of what you have known in your heart for years?" she said. "It was only that you could not accept it. As to the other answers you seek, about your mother, and who she was, and _how_ she was, I do not have them. I cannot dream of everything. But maybe you will find them, in time."

"I should take my sister to Casterly Rock then," Jaime said. "My son, Tommen, can't be left alone with her."

Brienne's heart was about to break in two. Or in many pieces, with ease, with every word he said. Even if what Jaime decided to do was _honourable_ , she had to admit it, she could no longer cherish the idea of being within the same walls with Cersei. And she hoped, she started to hope that they would ride, _or even fly north_ , she thought, swallowing her growing fear of heights. To take part in the dread and the glory of the battle that was certain to come, against the terror of the cold.

"And why by the old gods should you do that?" the Ghost asked, in amazement. "Now I understand why you came, and it is good that you did."

"Look at me," the old woman said, grasping Jaime's stump, in a way he would consider it too intimate and withdraw his arm from anyone who tried.

But the old lady had a grip of steel, and he could not avoid her.

"I dreamed again," she said, "of a one-handed knight riding a white dragon, and of a different knight wearing a blue armour, running on the top of a wall made of ice… Bringing the doom closer to the false hero Azor Ahai…"

She almost chanted, and the flow of her voice flooded them like the Trident did with the Riverlands. "Your sister's choices have not been yours for a while. You are not bound by blood to pay for what she had done. And your son is a lad grown. You will not make it up to him for not being his father when he needed you by fathering him now. "

"Haven't you asked yourself why you were spared? Who will take Viserion north if you will not? Where does your duty lie? Where is your honour? It is not in the past, I'd say," the ghost murmured incessantly, voice suddenly soft, like a rain falling. "Not in the past. Maybe in the future... What we are bound to achieve is mostly in front of us, not behind us… We are a promise of tomorrow, not of yesterday."

Brienne imagined herself running over the Wall in a blue armour. Would Jaime save her? Would she save Jaime? Would they both die… She felt crestfallen, and it was childish. But she was still young, and she still wanted to strive for something worthy. Not wait for the peril to come to them, hidden behind the thick castle walls.

"Look!" the ghost commanded them.

They obeyed, and they saw.

A dark divide floated all over the lands in the distance, unfolding far up north, an invisible line drawn between the desolation of winter, and the many coloured autumn.

"It is holding now," she said, "but it will not hold forever."

They have seen it before, or rather experienced its existence, Brienne remembered. And then they've forgotten all about it as soon as they turned their backs on the caves of the old gods in the Riverlands, and started the mad ride to the capital.

"Before going south again, we should head north," Brienne concluded, hoping she was right.

"A wise man would listen to his wife," the old woman told Jaime, and her face changed, at times resembling a male face, at times a female one, both older than the world.

"What are you?" Jaime asked.

"I was a child, once", the creature answered. "Now I am the only one of my kind left here, and I will hold this border for as long as I can. But even I will not last forever."

"Tell us more about yourself," Brienne asked, embarrassed how her question came out as a demand where it was a mere curiosity.

"I have seen the dawn of the days," she said, an old woman again. "And if I live to see the next spring, and if either of you return hither, you will know for yourself."

With that, they were alone with the weirwood stumps, and the Ghost was gone. The wind rustled in the grass and some kind of prickly drizzle began to fall. Viserion lay on his spiked back, exposing his snout and the shiny scales on his belly to the rain, waiting for his human siblings to resolve their differences.

"Jaime," Brienne said, "please," she may have mentioned, losing coherence of speech, "listen."

"I saved your sister once, after her trial by combat. You were in the dungeons, where she had put you, and I took her away from the mob. I did it for you, for you were not there to do it yourself. She repaid me by leading me to someone of her trust who hit my head, and left me in the streets of King's Landing for the Lady Stoneheart to find me. If Daenerys' men did not find her ladyship too, when she dragged me out of the capital, I don't know what would have become of me.

I believed blindly then, and after, that I was a true knight where no one else was. I thought I could let you go back to Cersei if that was your wish. I was wrong. Forgive me!" Brienne pleaded, discovering the limits of her soul, after having seen the borders of the world. "I cannot share you with your sister. I will not."

Jaime's face brightened as if her admission of the narrowness of her heart were the greatest gift she could have bestowed on him. He offered her a crooked smile in return, of an insolent man he used to be. She sometimes missed that man, for when he would resurface, Brienne knew that Jaime was all right.

"You've heard the Ghost," he said wickedly. "I shouldn't linger in my past, should I? It's not my destiny."

"So we go north," Brienne said, hopeful. For whatever was up there, would surely be better than her husband going backwards to atone for the sins not only him, but his entire family had committed.

"North," he said, encompassing Brienne's waist with a gesture full of loving, albeit she still thought her figure to be far less graceful than a thick weirwood branch.

"Why not?" he drew her closer, reminding her one more time on how his strength so closely matched her own.

Brienne would wear a blue armour again, when they approached the Wall. But on the flat moor of the High Heart, towering above the bareness of winter, she was content about her knees getting weak, and for not wearing any steel at all.

Viserion flew away of his own accord when they did it again.

The grass was softer than a featherbed, and their loving undisturbed.

**Arya**

King Rhaegar left the capital by the Dragon Gate, taking the kingsroad. Aunt Lyanna was with him, riding side by side.

When Arya Stark closed her eyes, she could be a wolf, and when she opened them again she could be a girl. The girl holding reins, and a stone vessel with ashes. The girl who held vigil in the sept with the boy who abandoned her, only to find her later on, when she was asleep.

And the wolves, all the wolves, they were already gone, travelling north in their own pace and speed. She could smell the country where they were treading whenever she would close her eyes. The wolves knew they were running to danger, and maybe to death.

But the girl could open her eyes and forget that, until the true threat came.

"Lord Varys, Lord Connington," the Silver King said gravely to his two counsellors, leaving in their care the huge keys of the city. "I ride forth and I may not return. May you find the strength to rule the city in my absence and to correct each other for what one lacks, and the other has in plenty… Whatever you do, keep the glass candle burning on the Iron Throne until such time that a rightful king should return, be it me or someone else…"

The spider in crimson robes, and the red haired lord in full armour bent forward, accepting their duties.

The army of the dead joined the king's army from the side of the kingswood, waiting to step after the living, separated by a wall of torches, set alight by Drogon, who soared freely in the sky. The chosen victim of the many-faced god, Princess Daenerys, was on his back. Her own white horse walked alone at the head of the army near the king and the queen, next to the handsome prince they called Aegon, and Jeyne the innkeep from the Riverlands. She seemed enamoured enough of the prince, so that she would not want to ring Gendry's bells, much to Arya's liking.

The Hound and the Stranger followed closely behind the king. Sansa was on a wagon, not far behind. _No wonder,_ Arya remembered, _she could never ride._

"It's not just any carriage," Gendry told her, noticing what she looked at. "It brought us here from the Riverlands. The King, me, even the Hound, we were loaded on it like sacks of grain when we were badly wounded. The King wanted it on this quest, for luck."

Arya nodded, trying very hard to forget that her sister had _married_ the Hound.

"Look," Gendry said. "The dead lord, Euron, he only has eyes for Jeyne now, he's not even glaring at the princess and her dragon!"

King Rheagar noticed the same thing Gendry did, and faced the dead commander of a part of his army with menacing austerity.

"My lord," he said, "I trust that you can convince your men not to start dying for each other in order to return to life. There is no guarantee that what Lady Catelyn Stark did would work for any of you. There seem to be different kinds of wights in the world as we know it."

"So much is true," Euron said. "And I will heed to your wisdom, in that. But if one wight can come back to life, than why another could not? I will not forbid my people to hope."

"And no one asked it of you," the king said. "Hope may be the best we have, in that and in all things."

With that, he joined aunt Lyanna. Slowly, they rode forward, always together, and always a step ahead from their retinue. If they feared the future, they did not let it show.

It was time.

Before urging Stranger to move, the Hound turned back to look at Sansa, who was fighting with the reins of the four horses in front of her wagon. Her movements were so clumsy that Arya had to laugh. Until her sister _whispered_ something to the beasts and they obeyed her, starting gently forward.

"What?" Arya exclaimed, and faced Gendry, laughing harder than she ever did that day.

"Your sister may be different than you," he admitted, "but she can be equally resourceful, my lady."

"Not a lady," Arya muttered, closing her eyes.

The wolves were almost in Harrenhal, almost at the divide between autumn and winter. That was where the evil already lurked, they knew. She howled in despair when one of her lesser wolves who ventured forward on its own was slain by the enemy, and when it rose to life with dead blue eyes, running away from the pack. With her eyes shut, Arya was afraid. The pack continued north, sticking together.

But her curiosity to discover what laid ahead with her eyes wide open has always been way stronger than her fear.

"A green dragon, and a white wolf…" she whispered a sentence she still remembered from a dream she could no longer recall in its entirety.

"What?" it was Gendry's turn to wonder.

"Never mind," Arya said.

"It's the second time we're going to the Wall together," Gendry said. "Do you reckon we'll reach it this time, my lady?"

"Let's just follow the tide, in the beginning," Arya said, glad that on a new journey with Gendry she would not have to hide the way she was making water. And maybe, in time, he would stop calling her a lady.

The army went forth as a long serpent of men, wheelhouses and beasts. Part of it would follow by ships, to the Eastwatch by the Sea, led by the captains of Princess Daenerys. Drogon would fly in-between, as a black link between the two wings of the hosts.

Somewhere, in the middle of the company following uncle Rhaegar, Mance Rayder sang tenderly, supporting a young boy in the same saddle. The thick brown horse, _Patience_ , Gendry told her, stared forward as a mule.

Mance sang to the boy, or to everyone who listened:

_In the last army of men I rode north_

_Towards the longest evening of all_

_To witness the nightfall_

_To where the Wall still stands tall._

_xxx_

_For a dream lasting thousands of years_

_Is not death, is not defeat_

_Those who walked once, they will walk again,_

_Until they are put back to sleep._

_xxx_

_Go to the weirwoods first, you men,_

_Them trees stood before the walkers_

_Them trees grew when the sun was born_

_To shine over and warm your lands._

_xxx_

_The weirwoods may still know_

_about the dark blood of the earth._

_The way to purge the land from doom_

_Only the weirwoods may yet know._

_xxx_

_From this ride, many will not return!_

_And if I am one of them,_

_May my soul linger_ _behind the Wall_

_When the spring will come again!_

_xxx_

_Hear my song, my son._

_And if miss me you will,_

_Embrace a white tree, and close your eyes_

_to see my ancient face._

_xxx_

_Back to the blood of the earth I returned_

_For you and your young kin_

_They will stand by you where I cannot_

_And I will be within._

_xxx_

_In the roots of the trees I will dwell_

_Where death has lost its hold_

_Where there is shade and lasting rest_

_For those who loved the north_

_xxx_

_And if miss me you will,_

_Forget about my death,_

_Pick up my lute, draw a breath,_

_And sing of how I lived._

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the point where I always intended to end this story because I thought, and I still think, that inventing even a mildly plausible end of ASOIAF in a fanfic is way too difficult. For me in any case.
> 
> However, while editing a few last chapters of this story, the ideas of what could happen next started coming into mind.
> 
> I may attempt to write a sequel, a sort of a very imperfect and very incomplete tale about the winter, and its end, on the basis of this story. It may start to appear in 2015, probably with a slower pace of updates that this story ever had (and I just figured that this story took me a year to write, which is way too long for a fic). It should be a Jon/Dany story, because, predictably, I see them as endgame.
> 
> The pairings from this story would probably continue. I just don't know yet where they would go from here.
> 
> Leave a comment if you would consider reading such a story, if you wish.
> 
> Thank you to all who read this story, liked it, or commented on it. The idea that it was fun for someone else is mostly what kept it going :-))
> 
> Thank you again and god bless.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Play to Remember (Tales for November)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5124110) by [ClaireVioletThorpe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClaireVioletThorpe/pseuds/ClaireVioletThorpe)




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